“That’s all right,” she said quietly. “I’ll work something out, that’s all right.”
But when she crossed her name off the list the next afternoon, the organizer leafed through some notes, fiercely mauled his beard, and informed her that her early shift had not been covered and that they couldn’t let everyone do this, it would throw the whole system into chaos.
“Life’s catching up with people, I understand, I’m inconvenienced myself,” he said defensively, “but these are the rules, you know how it is.”
She nodded mutely.
The next day she called in sick at school, and again the day after that. On the third day Emilia Khristianovna, who had abandoned her wait earlier that week, came by to warn her. “I overheard the principal talking with her assistant, they were talking about you, they said—” When she leaned close to her ear, Anna could once again smell the peculiar mixture of damp wool and hot metal of classroom experiments.
“Thank you,” Anna tried to say, but could barely hear her own words over the constant drip-drop of water from the black, gleaming branches of the trees above.
That evening, after Sasha had finished his supper and left to study, and her mother had drunk her cup of tea (as she had done every night since the incident in the park, though she still said little beyond “No sugar, please” and “Thank you” and “Good night”), Anna remained in the kitchen. She sat by the window waiting, her hands listlessly crossed in her lap, the night breeze siphoning rain and gasoline from the outside world into the darkened mouse-hole of her home.
Sergei returned just past ten o’clock. He winced when he saw her.
“The leftovers are on the stove,” she said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“We need to talk,” she said.
Lowering himself onto a chair, he stared grimly at the rows of radishes lining their plastic tablecloth. He knew what was coming, of course. She had never convincingly explained her presence in the park that night—she said she had needed fresh air—but he had no doubt that she had heard rumors about him and Sofia and had set out in borrowed finery to spy on them. He tried to summon a feeling of anger and, failing, attempted to gather himself for the inevitable, terrible question she would now ask—
“I can’t cover mornings anymore,” Anna said. “My school schedule is different this fall.”
“What?” he said, glancing up with a start.
“My mother can’t stand in line.” She was looking at the floor, speaking in a flat, tired voice. “And Sasha’s a university student now, I don’t want to burden him more than he already is. We’re going to lose our place.”
He swallowed something like a sudden sob. “I—I can help,” he said.
“You can?”
“Sure. I can ask the director to shift my hours back. I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”
In the momentary silence, he thought he could hear the rain gently flicking at the windowpane, the splashing of footfalls through the puddles on the street six floors below, the slow, effortful lifting of Anna’s eyes in her pale, thinning face. Within her still irises, two tiny lightbulbs hung like deep, glowing scratches. “I wish I still could…” she began, and stopped, her voice wobbling with an excess of some emotion he could not identify. “That is, I had a gift for you, but I can’t now—not after losing her earrings—”
“A gift,” he repeated tonelessly. He did not want to feel any more gratitude, could not bear to feel any more gratitude. “What gift?”
She stood up, walked to the stove.
“It’s nothing,” she said with firmness, as though closing some door. “Just an idea for—for your birthday that didn’t work out. If you’re not going to eat, I’ll put it away.”
“No, wait,” he said. “I’ll have a bite after all. Go get some rest now, I’ll clean up.”
She left. He gazed after her for a long moment. Behind the wall, a neighbor’s radio started to broadcast a program about motherhood; the announcer’s familiar old voice talked of the somnolent delights of a child’s first year, a baby girl with a gurgling laugh and surprising green eyes. He listened as he ate, trying to ignore the strange, piercing feeling of regret—and something else, something else entirely, that kept rising in his throat like a half-digested belch, burning his insides, filling him with an insidious, impossible knowledge, about his wife, and his wife’s mother, and this radio program that, he had known all along, might not be a radio program at all—until the announcer drowned in static.
The next morning he knocked on Ivan Anatolievich’s door. The director was pushing his belly back and forth across his vast office with an air of beleaguered importance, the telephone receiver embedded deeply in the red folds of his neck, the cord trailing behind him like a puppet string. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, can’t you see I’m in the middle of something!” he bellowed, dismissing Sergei with an imperious wave.
Sergei barely prevented himself from slamming the door on his way out; and all through the day, a dull, heavy anger simmered inside him, so much so that later that evening, when shadows crept forth around the kiosk and a small crowd of Nightingales hoodlums gathered once again on the other side of the street, jeering and taunting, he shouted back at them: “Go home to your barns and haystacks where you belong!”
Someone from across the street threw a rock. It drew a violent arc through the twilight; the line watched it in an anxious hush. When a hurt gasp splashed a few backs ahead of Sergei, the Nightingales howled with laughter and scattered into the darkness.
“That,” said Vladimir Semyonovich quietly, “was uncivilized. You shouldn’t have provoked them. We aren’t like them.”
“Ah yes, turn the other cheek. That cross must be rubbing off on you,” Sergei snapped, and looked away, ignoring the stricken expression on Sofia’s face, and was silent for the rest of the shift. He felt furious still as he walked home—furious and helpless; and when some nondescript fellow of indeterminate age, whom he had glimpsed once or twice at the end of the line, fell into step with him and curiously asked what the spat was about and whether the mustachioed comrade back there had displayed religious leanings, Sergei brushed him off with an uncustomary rudeness.
At home, in the bedroom’s dimness, Anna’s face was expectant, her eyes drained of color above the soiled lace of her old peach-colored robe, his third-anniversary present. When he walked in and saw her standing in the middle of the room—not doing anything, just standing, her face turned toward the door, her arms by her sides, as if she had been standing like that the whole time he was gone, waiting for his return—he felt his fury seep out as abruptly as it had swelled inside him. “I—I haven’t yet cleared up my situation,” he mumbled.
She emitted a very faint “Oh,” less than a sound, more like a shape of her lips imprinted in a barely audible, disappointed exhalation onto the air.
He took an impulsive step toward her, touched his hand to her cheek; then, taken aback by his unexpected gesture, shifted away, began to unbutton his shirt, humming tunelessly. He would not look at her, but he could sense her starting into skittish motion, flitting swiftly about the room, readjusting the blankets, drawing the curtains, pushing up the lampshade to broaden the cone of beige light that fell onto the bed; he heard his tuba ring out as she stumbled against it, heard her laugh a tiny, flustered laugh.
“Sorry. Would you like—” she began.
He glanced up, his chest constricted.
She was holding out a shapeless white lump on her palm.
“It’s melted a bit, but it still smells wonderful,” she whispered.
He felt unable to move, suspended by the expectation of what she might say next, of what he might say in reply; but she was silent now, watching him, her head tilted, her eyes damp and tender, deepened by shadow. Shaking off his stillness, he hastily took the deformed chocolate from her hand, put it in his mouth, swallowed without chewing, all the while smiling wretchedly, his teeth smeared with untasted sweetness.