BY EIGHT O’CLOCK, Anna had become somewhat unsettled by Sergei’s absence. She had grown angry by nine. By ten, she was worried. After finishing with the dishes, she opened the window and, leaning on the windowsill, looked out. The spring night smelled young and raw, of gasoline, damp, and anxiety; the street jangled with the passage of rare trolleys, clicked with the determined retreats of couples on their way home. For some time she stood collecting splinters of quarrels, sorting through squeals of tires. Occasional headlights flashed by in a whirl of song, an unrecognizable fragment of merriment, which made her imagine a close, perfumed dimness, the city breezing past in a black square of smudged illumination, a head thrown back in laughter, a hand lightly grazing a hand… After a while, she moved to the bedroom.
She opened the window there as well, but as the room faced the building’s inner courtyard, there were no cars, no steps, no voices, no music—no sounds at all. In the diffused, scant light from the hallway, Sergei’s tuba lay coiled on the floor like a slumbering dragon, its skin glistening; she felt briefly calmer in its presence, better able to reassure herself that nothing was amiss, that her husband would be arriving at any moment. She had asked him a favor she should not have asked, perhaps, but even so, he would be arriving shortly. She waited, and after a while knew that the night was just as filled with sounds and smells on this darker, private side. They were different here, the sounds and the smells, furtive, hidden, subterranean almost—a whisper instead of a laugh, the wet dip and rise of a tiptoe instead of the click-clack of a heel, a sharp waft of cigarette smoke on the wing of a nocturnal wind, a teakettle singing softly in someone’s flat across a span of sky, a bird stirring in precariously balanced sleep or else a girl sighing—a hushed, secret welling of invisible, joyous things within a tight bud of darkness. As she listened, trapped inside her own walled-in allotment of blind space, her breath stilled, her face grew hot, and her blood beat a solitary rhythm in her throat.
It was well past eleven—twenty-three minutes past—when she heard the key in the lock. She stayed where she was; she wanted him—willed him—to enter the shadows of the bedroom, to find her here, quiet and flushed, waiting at the heart of all the unspoken, barely remembered little moments of their nearly twenty years together. The apartment brimmed with the clutter of remote noises—shoes shed, keys tossed, coins dropped, an odd collection of unidentifiable rustles—but the noises failed to come closer, moving into the kitchen instead, expanding there into the clanging of dishes, the shutting of windows, the mechanics of a meal.
Unclenching her hands, she walked out of the bedroom.
Sergei was sitting at the table, a piece of bread on a plate before him.
“Where have you been?” she asked, her voice sharpened by disappointment.
“Standing in line,” he said flatly, picking up a slice of butter on his knife.
“Oh,” she said. His face was closed as before, but something in it, some thought, some emotion, seemed to have shifted, laying new perspectives open to internal illumination, giving rise to new shadows; it was lighter and darker at the same time. Suddenly uncertain, she tried to catch his eyes. He looked down at the knife; she imagined she glimpsed the reflection of his oblique gray gaze sliding down the stained blade like another sliver of butter.
“You forgot to shut the window,” he said as he smeared the bread.
“Sorry, I just thought… It’s almost April.”
“Well, it’s still cold at night… So they’re extending the line hours for the next week or so. Until ten or eleven, they told us.”
“Oh,” she said again. She felt her whole body sinking, spoke as if drowning. “I suppose I should go to bed, so I’m better rested tomorrow evening, if that’s—”
“I don’t mind waiting in the evenings for you,” he said. “Instead of you.”
She went quiet inside, sat down. He studied his buttered bread, then rose, took the knife to the sink, turned on the water. She watched his back mutely.
“I could come by after work, around five,” said his back. “To replace you, I mean.”
“Serezha.” She spoke slowly. “Serezha. I would never ask that of you.”
“I don’t mind,” he repeated, still without turning; through the water’s continuous splashing she strained to discern some meaning in his voice devoid of expression. It did not take this long to wash one knife, she thought. “Oh yes, I forgot—I brought you some dates, someone in line was selling them. They are in the bag on the windowsill. I hear you can make a nice cake with them or something… Well, my feet are sore, I better go lie down…” The water stopped running at last. He moved across the kitchen swiftly, a blur of gray. “Good night.”
“Serezha, wait! You haven’t yet eaten your bread. I’ll sit with you—”
“I’m very tired. Have it if you like. Well, good night.”
He left. She listened to his steps accompanied by the flipping of light switches. Then, compelled by a sudden desire to move, to make some gesture, to respond to some obscure feeling already rising inside her, threatening to overwhelm her, she stood abruptly, grabbed the bag with the dates off the windowsill, tied its handles together to prevent the smell from escaping, and walked to the front door, and onto the landing.
Her mouth set, she put the bag on the floor by the trash chute.
Back in the kitchen, she ate the piece of bread she did not want. A neighbor’s radio chimed midnight. She thought of a cuckoo clock they had when she was little—a lacquered gingerbread house from whose balcony a crimson-beaked, brightly painted bird took eager, lopsided bows. She used to watch it for hours, she remembered, happily anticipating the passage of time, in some shadowy room of a shadowy house she could no longer trust her memory to furnish; though now the clock, too, had an unreal, dusty quality to it, as if it had been merely an illustration to some fairy tale, glimpsed through a milky, semitransparent sheet used to cover pictures in old books, or a stanza from a poem that now alighted on her lips, a few stray lines she repeated, not knowing where she had heard them.
She fell asleep with the words still moving through her mind—I live like a cuckoo in a clock, I don’t envy birds in forests, They wind me, and I sing—and their deceptively lighthearted nursery-rhyme rhythm bounced in her barefoot steps when, at three or four in the morning, she rose and traversed the unlit treachery of cluttered hallways, gathering bruises on her naked shins. On the way back from the bathroom she paused, for a strange green light, wavering like seaweed, seemed to seep from under her mother’s door. She pressed her temple against the doorjamb and, barely awake, thought she heard a voice, quivering like sunlight under the water, weaving in and out of sleep, then falling silent. Lowering herself onto the floor, she leaned against the wall and drifted into an uneasy doze; and in her slumber, the voice was speaking again, and her dream was spinning, spinning it out like a thread of fine silk, and the thread gently wound round and round, and round, enclosing her in a warm cocoon, and the voice asked:
Have you ever seen a chestnut tree?
A pity. Close your eyes, my dear, and imagine.
In the Western city where I lived as a child grew hundreds of chestnut trees. Whole alleys of them, whole gardens, whole parks even. They were beautiful trees, tall and strong, some of them centuries old. For one week in the spring, the city would light up with thousands upon thousands of soft candles of chestnut blossoms, and in the fall, when pavements whispered with dead leaves, there would be thousands of chestnuts, hard and glossy, hidden among them. Their color was bright—not quite brown, not quite red, much like the lustrous, heaving sides of horses I would sometimes see prancing along the paths in the chestnut parks.