“Can we just drink water?” the boy said, holding the open tea caddy. “Mama has only a couple spoonfuls of tea left.”
She watched him as he gingerly tasted the cake.
“It’s nice,” he said, and set it down on his saucer.
She tried it in turn, found her tongue glued to her gums with the cloying sweetness of rot.
“I’m glad you like it,” she said, setting her piece down as well. Must have kept the dates out on the windowsill for too long, she chided herself. For a while after that, they sat in silence, sipping hot water, inhaling the dim, stale, quiet smells of the kitchen filled with things unused, things not needed. “When I was little,” she said at last, looking past him, “we had a big family and many friends. On my father’s side. We had wonderful suppers together. My parents owned the most beautiful china, with thin golden rims, so delicate you could see candlelight right through it. Only one cup is left now, but once, there was enough for twenty-four people, and not one plate remained in the cupboards during our suppers, that’s how many guests we’d have.” As she talked, she felt the vague sketch of her childhood expanding around her, flooding with color, ringing with noisy children, warming with flames in glowing fireplaces—becoming real. “I remember soup smoking in the tureens. After we had our dessert, my mother would play the piano… Then my father died crossing the street. Automobiles were rare in those days, so people forgot to look. Before the Change.”
“My father isn’t dead,” said the boy. “He’s just away. He’ll be back someday.”
“Of course he will,” she said with a teacher’s bright intonation.
He looked at her mutely, and the clouds moved fast in his aged eyes.
She grew flustered then, and wanted to say something else, something meaningful, something he would remember, perhaps, years from now. For an instant she thought she sensed the right words: they were already crowding her mouth, powerful and wise, rolling like heavy, primordial boulders along her tongue—but as she was about to speak, a loud, leathery sound exploded in the next room, as if a demented bat had smashed into the wall.
The boy, who had been staring at her without blinking, waiting for something, quickly looked down at his hands. “Grandfather has a cough. It’s not contagious or anything,” he said.
The boulders rolled back down her tongue, smaller, smaller yet—mere rocks, then pebbles, then only sand, scratching, hurting her throat—until she no longer knew what they were, what they had been. “I thought you were alone,” she said, whispering for some reason.
“Grandfather always naps in the evenings.”
“I should go now.”
“You could stay to meet him. He’s awake.”
She shook her head, rising.
“They’ll be waiting for me at home,” she lied. “I—I’ll leave the cake for you.”
She walked uneasily past the black-and-white strangers on the walls, feeling as if she had peeked uninvited through a keyhole and seen the intimate, raw underbellies of lives she had no right to invade—the dead man with a radiant smile, his mousy widow-wife, her eyes under invisible eyelashes stretched thin with sorrow, the two gangly, overdressed youths from the previous century who might have once, amidst the gilt, the stateliness, the tranquillity of the past, dreamed courageous dreams of becoming great musicians, of escaping the ordinariness of their lots—of not ending their days in shabby apartments of dreary buildings, cherishing no hopes but to live long enough to attend someone else’s concert…
She walked slowly, but her heart beat as though she were fleeing.
Once outside, she ran, ran through the luminous April evening fresh with green twilight, through the light, clear smells that tugged at her hair, her clothes, her heart with fierce, wordless summons. When she got home, she hurried to the bedroom, and, consumed by urgency, plowed through a drawer, throwing clothes about in rising frustration, at last pulling out, from under a flattened layer of winter stockings, a brown-tinted snapshot, which fit inside her palm. She closed her hand over it, feeling the thickness of the paper under her fingertips.
“A big family and many friends on my father’s side,” she repeated aloud, indecisively, as if testing the truth of her words.
That night she did not sleep, groping for the contours of her past in the well of her memory the color of a winter night, encountering only the underside of strange, insubstantial feelings that scurried away from her touch like the cockroaches that ran off when the light came on in the kitchen. She had been only five at the time of the Change; she had forgotten more than she remembered. Sometime before dawn, she tiptoed down the corridor, and stopped, and listened; but of course, there was no voice, there had never been any voice, all was quiet. She wanted to burst inside, shake her mother awake, demand answers to all the things she did not know, all the things she had not thought to ask before. Tell me why you need a ticket to this concert. Do you miss your youth, your years in the ballet, before you had me, before everything changed? Tell me about your dancing. And my father, tell me about my father. Did he want you to keep dancing, or was he glad of me? Were you? And where did we live before that drafty communal apartment I remember from later? Did I have many friends? Did I dream up the fireplace, the piano, the suppers? And where were you on that day when my father stepped into the road without looking?
Did you cry for him?
Did you love him?
Were you happy?
She rested her hand briefly on the door handle, held its cold concealed in her palm, then returned to her bed, to her husband’s unnaturally measured snores. She spent the next week or two combing the neighborhood, and in the end, slightly queasy, bought a small framed portrait of a somber-eyed woman, someone’s aunt or godmother, perhaps, from a breezy character in a torn jacket who accosted her in a deserted alley, his breath vile, his pockets spilling with all sorts of pathetic, expiring knickknacks. At home, having mauled the corners of her father’s square photograph with the dull scissors she used for splaying open her special-occasion chickens, she crammed it into the oval frame. She had not discarded the unknown woman; a bit of the woman’s white dress still showed in a jagged rip produced by a nervous dip of her hand. When she was done, she studied her father’s stolid middle-aged face, his nearsighted, kindly eyes, the shadowy presence of the second chin; then, not finding what she sought, she carefully placed the newly framed picture on her nightstand.
Still, that recent feeling of urgency did not release her, and one evening in May, with her husband waiting in line, her son eating a solitary supper, and her mother drawing a bath, she slipped into the room that was not hers, and hastily, her movements ugly, violated a dresser, making it yield its long-preserved scents of dried flowers and aged frailty and graceful turn-of-the-century transgressions. Flushed, she fumbled through the neatly folded strata of decaying lace, of silk worn thin and brittle as old paper. At last, lifting the edge of a musty green shawl, she found what she wanted, and stealthily carried the bundle off to her bedroom.
There, some hours later, Sergei happened upon her, sitting on the edge of the bed with her arms wound around her knees, her knuckles white.
“Has something… Are you all right?” he asked.
She nodded, but would not meet his eyes. Her eyelashes were spiky with dampness.