“Why?” he asked without interest.
Liuba had counseled her to turn the evening into an adventure, something new.
“Oh, Sasha asked me to tell you if I ran into you,” she said nonchalantly. “I guess he wants to see you before his shift. He’ll be waiting for you.”
After a short pause, he spoke. “I’ll be there, thanks.”
She followed him with her eyes, wondering whether she had imagined the unexpected brightening in his face, then ran home. She would have liked to take a bath, but there was no hot water—they shut it off for a month or two every summer, for maintenance, the notice on her building always read—so she put on a teakettle, then poured its steaming stream into a large pot filled with cold water, and ladled diluted lukewarm cupfuls over herself while she crouched in the tub. As a week’s worth of summer grime left her skin, she began to feel small whirls and lulls in the air, tiny pocket-sized breezes, dips and rises in temperature, the evening, the world, stirring alive in barely perceptible, hopeful ways.
She dashed from the bathroom as she was, unembarrassed by her nakedness, the linoleum cold against her feet, and in the bedroom pushed the window wide open, her full breasts grazing the sill. Breathing deeply, suddenly exhilarated, she looked at the flat roofs, the lamps starting to come on in other homes, the moistly gleaming fish scale of the crescent moon.
Liuba’s blue satin dress was carefully spread out on the bed; she touched its pearly softness to assure herself that it was real.
A little past nine o’clock, as she was applying a layer of matching blue paint to her eyelids, she heard the front door open and close. Throwing on a robe, she walked out of the bedroom. Her son was striding down the corridor toward his room, carrying a load of books in his arms. Studying so hard for his entrance exams, she thought, and stopped, seized with a desire to say something to him, something warm, something that would include him in her nearing happiness; but just then, the telephone jumped into shrill existence behind her back.
She answered. A boy’s voice asked politely for Sasha.
“It’s for you,” she said. He picked up the receiver.
“Yeah?” he said. “Oh, Stepka, hey!… Right now? Actually, I’m just… Oh, I see… Where?… Not a problem, I’ll be right there.”
She gazed after him a bit regretfully, sorry to have been checked in her generous impulse; she wished the night could be special for everyone she loved.
The park was deserted, shadows dense underfoot, the air deep, cool, charged with approaching autumn; a few dead leaves rustled on the path as Alexander hurried along.
His friend sat sprawled on a bench, tossing rocks at the streetlamp.
“That was fast,” he said, and waved his cigarette at his feet. “Here it is, then.”
Alexander bent, picked up the flat square-shaped parcel bundled in newspapers.
“What’s the damage?” he asked.
The youth threw another rock at the lamp as he replied. The metal post issued a hollow clang, swallowing Alexander’s gasp.
“Took some doing,” Stepan said with a shrug. “Almost impossible to find. Banned, right? This one’s from Over There. Might be a scratch on it, but it shouldn’t skip too much.”
He searched the ground for a bigger rock, took aim.
“When do you need the money?”
Glass shattered, and darkness leaked out, as if autumn had arrived abruptly in the park. The scar under Stepan’s eye vanished; his face dissolved into a vague, satisfied, smoke-wreathed blur. In the pale echo of light from the windows above them, Alexander watched him lean back, ease out a bottle from the crook of his arm.
“For you, no rush,” Stepan said. “I can wait till next week. Want some?”
“No, I should go, my shift’s coming up.”
“You and that line of yours—such dedication… Well, I’ll be here for a while if you feel like stopping by later. Been running around like crazy the last few days, I figure I deserve to sit back for a few hours, smell the roses.”
“Yeah, sure,” Alexander said. “Thanks, brother. See you around.”
Not willing to risk standing in line with the black-market merchandise in his possession, he walked back home. In the shaky dimness of the elevator, he ripped off the newspaper skin, a few stray phrases dangling in thin shreds under his fingers—“under the auspices of,” “repeatedly with a heated iron,” “to the glorious end”… He slid the record out of its sleeve and held it locked between his palms, the black brilliance of its concentric circles moving round and round between his hands like grooves of a tree trunk, the edges brittle and sharp, the label reading Igor Selinsky, Violin Concerto in—The doors jerked open, and, his eyes still on the label, he stepped out, and smashed headfirst into a woman in a horrid shiny dress.
He felt his hands go limp, heard the sickening crack of something hard hitting the concrete of the landing, her high, incongruously girlish giggle, “Ah, Sasha, it’s you, I just thought I’d go for a little walk, there are cold cutlets if you’re—” But already the doors were groaning, closing by fits and starts like creaking old jaws taking small bites out of the terrible vision of his mother, her face motley and glossy, her eyelashes twitching with mascara like the hairy legs of some squashed insect, her skin showing white and thick through the silky stockings, her smeared lips smiling, smiling at him for one instant from inside the elevator’s painfully, pitilessly illuminated box, in another instant nothing but a fissure of light going down, down…
Frantically he fumbled for his keys, let himself in, and, bursting into his room, thrust the record under his lamp, gave it a rapid onceover. There was a nasty slash running through it; he did not think it had been there before, but he could not be sure. He pushed it back into its sleeve, his hands trembling so much that he made another awkward movement, felt another creak-crack of plastic under his fingers. Leaving the record on his desk, he switched the light off and rushed out.
There was no trace of his mother on the street. He walked briskly, as if to flee his unease, and reached the kiosk before ten, just as the evening shift was departing. His father was there still; Alexander saw him wave, then turn to speak to someone behind him, and move toward him with broad, impatient strides. They met on a corner half a block away.
“You’re early, were you waiting for me at the park?” his father asked in a hurried undertone. “Do you have it?”
Alexander glanced at him in surprise.
“How did you… I didn’t know you knew… Never mind. Yeah, I have it. It’s in my room, on the desk. There might be a… it may skip a little. They want the payment by—”
His words choked as his father embraced him.
“Thank you, Sasha,” he said. “I’ll have the money. And anything you want, just ask.”
Sofia was waiting for him in the next street.
“Oh, Sergei Vasilievich, I can’t believe this,” she said. “To tell you the truth, I started thinking there was no record—that I somehow dreamed our conversation—”
He laughed with relief, lightly touching her elbow. They walked quickly, though not by the shortest route; they circumvented the park because it looked too dark and a drunken hollering interspersed with abandoned shrieks was rising in the heart of its shadows. Someone having a bit too much fun in a public place, Sergei thought with embarrassment, making an effort to ignore it, careful not to glance at Sofia until the shrieks became sobs, then drowned in the silence behind them. When they reached his building, he left her in the foyer by the mailboxes and, anxious, tiptoed inside his apartment, readying some innocuous lie for his wife. His wife, however, did not emerge from the bedroom—she must have gone to sleep early again—and there was the record, in a nest of torn newspapers on Alexander’s desk, just as the boy had promised.