Anna made a grab for it, missed, bent to retrieve it from the ground, from someone’s watery footprint. The smell reached her before she even saw what was inside: the dark, rich smell of southern earth, of unfamiliar trees with glossy leaves, of the measured roll of some distant sea. She exhaled in astonishment. “For me?” she whispered. “All this? Liubov Dmitriyevna, but that’s so… so unexpected. How can I—that is, how much do I—”
“Oh, I’m not taking any of your money.” The woman’s voice was muffled, her chin tucked under as she struggled to free an earring from the peacock swirls of a scarf. “Just think of it as a little charity. Teachers aren’t raking it in these days, I’m sure.”
Anna slowly set the bag on the ground and, straightening, looked at the woman.
“Now, me, I don’t have to worry, my husband gets me everything my little heart desires. See this hat? His Women’s Day present. The scarf too, pure silk, here, feel it… Fine, suit yourself… Wait, you’ve forgotten the dates!… Where are you—just where do you think you’re—”
No longer listening, Anna was walking away. She walked past middle-aged women copying the date tart recipe, past young women bending over the tired fashion magazine that had been traveling down the line these last few days, past boys scraping the remnants of the winter into sickly snowmen. She walked not noticing the little waterfalls erupting over her head, the wounding of shrunken snowdrifts by collapsed icicles, the world splashing about, wet and shining. Their building, when she reached at last its dim, concrete hollows, was filled with infants’ cries echoing in the stairwells and an assortment of midday smells, mostly shoe polish and soapsuds. When she stepped out of the elevator, her landing trembled with laboring sighs of the tuba; it was, she recalled, her husband’s afternoon off. She could feel the unpleasantly soft vibrations in the soles of her feet as she wrestled for a long minute with the lock before discovering she had the wrong key.
Once inside, she let her coat sink to the foyer floor, then moved down the hallway, entered her mother’s room without knocking. On the rare occasions when she came in here, to bring a cup of tea or quickly dust the shelves, empty save for a few thin, molting volumes, she was always visited by an uncomfortable feeling that she had accidentally stepped over the threshold into another house, another time, where everything, even the dust, had its precise place that she had no right to disturb. She stopped on the threshold now. In the solitary, narrow window, daylight floundered weakly, and died in the faded curtains the color of old tea roses; the small, casketlike space lay in the shadows of its own private, rose-tinted, faintly perfumed dusk. Her mother sat perched on the edge of her only chair, prim and straight-backed, an old tasseled lampshade billowing with soft brown light at the table before her, a fan of postcards spread in her lavender lap. When she looked up, her small, birdlike eyes, dark as velvet, held no reflections.
“Mama,” Anna said. “Mama, why do you need this ticket?”
The old woman made a tiny startled movement, and the postcards fell to the floor. She seemed about to speak, but did not. Anna waited; then, after a lapse of silence, turned and left, shutting the door behind her, careful to step over a sepia boulevard stained with horse-drawn carriages, which had fluttered out into the corridor.
The tuba sighs still ebbed and rose in the narrow veins of the apartment. She went into her son’s empty room, sat on his unmade bed, and stared unseeingly at the naked walls before her, indifferent to the sour effluvia of unwashed socks and furtive smoke and adolescence, her hands lifeless on her knees. She thought of the time, seemingly not that long ago, when she had expected something thrilling from her days in the line—a surprise, a present for herself, an escape from stifling routine—the time when she had felt richer, fuller, nestled deep within her vast anticipation as within a warm, secret cave. Now her life was laid bare once again, the anticipation gone, wrung dry by the tedium of the everyday bureaucracy of lists and shifts; and the waiting itself was for someone else now—not for her, never for her. She felt a sharp pang of loss, of impoverishment, which made her want to cry; but her eyes were dry when, some minutes later, her husband nudged the door open and peeked inside, muttering, “I thought I heard… What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, really,” she said, not lifting her eyes from her hands. “Only that I waste my life standing before that pointless kiosk, not to mention being insulted by some really tactless, uncivilized people, and no one will even tell me why—and you, you… you never… while other women’s husbands… you and I don’t even… you—”
Her voice, though not loud, had wound up and up, tight, tighter yet, until she stopped abruptly, as if the winding mechanism had sprained a spring.
“What?” he said stiffly. “You and I don’t even what?”
She studied her hands. Her nails were always breaking.
“Is this about Women’s Day again?” he said. “Look, I’ve told you already, I meant to get some flowers, but I just… The matinee schedule is really… All the kiosks were closed by the time… Just what do you want me to do?”
“We’ll lose our place,” she said distantly, “unless someone is there this afternoon. They do a check at the end of the day, just before five.”
“Our place?” he said. “You don’t mean—”
She met his eyes at last.
“I made her a promise,” she said, “but I’m very, very tired.”
“You can’t possibly expect me… Do you not realize how much—”
“Sergei,” she said, “I don’t need any flowers from you. But after all this time, I think I deserve something.”
He forced himself to continue looking at her—at her face widened by age, at the thickened folds of her eyelids, at the row of beetle-black buttons crawling down her sagging beige cardigan, at the stolid shape of her legs in the brown woolen hose she wore every winter, at her flat-heeled, square-nosed shoes, which she always took off upon entering their home, lining them meticulously alongside his own pair by the doormat, but which now rested, slightly apart, on their son’s bare floor in two darkening pools of melted mud…
He looked away.
“Fine,” he said. His voice scratched itself fighting to get out between his teeth.
“Our number is one hundred thirty-seven,” she called out after him. “There are some rules, I must explain, and you’ll need this, here—”
“Fine,” he said from the hallway, already punching his arms into his coat. “Fine, fine!”
He narrowly avoided crashing into his son, who had emerged, out of breath, from around the bend of the stairs, jerking his gaze away from his father’s face as if caught doing something illicit. While Sergei stood waiting for the elevator’s arrival, he heard the beginning of a quarrel inside the apartment, and, abandoning his wait, thumped down the steps instead, past a rasping of small angry dogs, past phalanxes of empty bottles behind the trash chute, past landing after landing freshly defaced by some savage—a few primitively expressed sentiments etched into the plaster with furious, knife-sharp slashes, which, by the time he threw his weight against the front door and was issued outside with a complaint of the hinges, reflected his own feelings with succinctness.
Seething, he strode down the street wet with puddles. He thought he might spend the hours walking, or catch a matinee, or buy a newspaper, find some dry place to read it. He paid no attention to where he was going; when he rounded a random corner and plowed into a crowd, he was momentarily disoriented, as if he had been transported to some unfamiliar, unlikely landscape in an alien city. He gazed at the orderly commas of bent backs marking the sidewalk in a depressingly long sentence—and an instant later, as understanding came, was assaulted by a vehement desire to register his protest, to say or do something offensive.