Essentially Tanya was not planning to go to Moscow, but things turned out not quite as she had wanted. Poluektova was scheduled to leave for Perm only at the end of January, while a long drawn-out scandal had erupted at Aleksandrov’s communal apartment with the neighbors, who had no intention of putting up with a tiny child on the other side of their plywood wall . . . Sergei refused to travel to Moscow to Tanya’s parents’ place: he had had enough of his own parents. Tanya’s departure upset him mainly because he had already managed to telephone everyone in town that he had a daughter, and no little vodka and dry wine had been drunk over the past week in that connection, but now he had no one to produce as proof.
Tanya hastily introduced her father to Sergei and asked if he would let her and Sergei go for a walk. Pavel Alekseevich let his daughter go for three hours, until the next feeding, and stayed with his little granddaughter. Five minutes after Tanya left, having been exposed to the infant’s soporific energy, he fell into a deep sleep, not to wake up until his daughter returned. He dreamed that he was asleep, but in the dream inside his dream it was summer outside, and a large group of children was getting ready to go to a pond. He was the eldest of the children, who included his younger sisters, nonexistent in real life, but who were very convincingly played by Lenochka in the role of an eight-year-old and Toma as a two-year-old. The other children were familiar, but also refashioned from adults he had come to know in the later years of his life. The duality of these people, however, did not at all surprise Pavel Alekseevich. What troubled him, rather, was that one of the boys was someone he did not know at all. Only at the very end of the dream, when the crowd of them poured out of their old dacha in Mamontovka, did it become apparent that the unknown little boy had been Tanya’s Sergei in disguise, after which Pavel Alekseevich stopped worrying and woke out of his deep sleep into a more shallow slumber and pressed the bundle swaddled in a thick blanket to his chest, thought for a minute about whether or not he wanted to go down to the pond with all these masquerading children, but decided not to return to that place . . .
The next day at eight fifteen in the morning, Pavel Alekseevich, his daughter, and granddaughter were home on Novoslobodskaya Street. Toma had not yet set off for work, Vasilisa crawled out of her pantry and stood with old Murka at her feet in her usual pose of greeting facing the corridor from the kitchen, propping herself with one hand against the wall. Out of the half-opened door into Elena’s room, Murka Jr. poked out first, followed by Elena in a robe thrown over her shoulders.
“Tanechka, I’ve been waiting for you for so long,” Elena said coherently and joyfully, and Tanya, passing her daughter to a perplexed Toma—who still did not know what to say and what to do—kissed her mother, while the latter pushed her away and reached for the bundle:
“Tanechka . . .”
“Momma, that’s my daughter.”
“That’s my daughter,” echoed Elena, anxious consternation forming on her face.
“Come with me, Momma, and I’ll show her to you . . .”
Tanya spread the child on her mother’s bed, while Pavel Alekseevich was relieved that Tanya was acting the right way, not scaring poor Elena, but drawing her into the new event.
Tanya undid the layers of clothes and extricated the tiny body. The little girl opened her eyes and yawned.
Elena looked on tensely and as if with disappointment.
“Well, do you like her?”
Elena lowered her head in embarrassment and looked the other way.
“That’s not Tanechka. That’s another little girl.”
“Mom, of course it’s not Tanechka. We still haven’t decided on a name for her. Maria, maybe? Masha, huh?”
“Evgenia,” Elena whispered barely audibly. Tanya did not hear what she said.
Vasilisa repeated: “How else? Evgenia. After your grandmother . . .”
Tanya bent over the little girl, who was pushing her little fist into her mouth.
“I don’t know . . . I have to think about it. Evgenia?”
While the women crowded around the baby, Tanya was swept upward, as if by a tidal wave, held there for a minute, then lowered down . . . She rushed about the apartment, looking into every cluttered corner . . .
“Dad, we’re remodeling,” she said to her father fifteen minutes later.
“Yes, actually, we’re long overdue,” Pavel Alekseevich agreed, “only now, I think, is not the time. There’s a baby in the apartment. Maybe in the summer, when you all go to the dacha . . .”
“No, no, I’ll leave for Piter later, we need to do it right now. We can start with the nursery . . . Then the common spaces, your study, the bedroom . . .”
In the evening, when Toma arrived home from work, half of her flowers had been distributed among the neighbors, half discarded, the furniture was stacked in the middle of the room, everything was covered over with a drop cloth, and a deal had been struck with the painters . . . Pavel Alekseevich got the feeling that their dilapidated abode, which had stood like an abandoned ship at anchor, had moved from its spot and set off sailing toward its destination, its sleepy crew awakened, and even the limp and sunken-in furniture lined up in formation and standing at attention . . . Vasilisa, who never threw anything out, surrendered to Tanya’s pressure and carried out of her pantry in her own two hands the decayed blanket given to her as a present by Evgenia Fedorovna in 1911, when it had already been not very new. But even that seemed not enough for Tanya, and with a cheerful sweeping movement she carried the chipped plates, burned pots and pans, and empty glass jars stored up just in case—Vasilisa’s entire collection of pauper’s-and-hoarder’s household goods—out to the trash heap.
The nameless little girl abided the orchestrated chaos almost without a peep, getting in no one’s way and demanding practically no attention. Tanya settled her in a laundry basket she had first lined with clean cotton print fabric, and for a while hauled the basket from room to room. Then Elena asked that the little girl be left near her bed, which formed a quiet corner that Tanya did not touch for the time being. The speed with which the apartment metamorphosed was amazing: the former girls’ room was redone in a week, and although Toma’s jungle suffered substantial losses, the surviving plants sparkled fresh against the background of sand-yellow wallpaper that recalled the heat of African deserts.
The next week was devoted to the kitchen and the bathroom. Cooking at home was cancelled. Tanya bought incalculable quantities of inexpensive food at the takeout store, fed the workers and her family as well as acquaintances, who dropped in from time to time. Vitalik telephoned on the third day, and Tanya greeted him with indifferent gladness. He came over immediately, frowning, with an insulted look on his face, but she did not trouble herself to notice. She showed him their daughter, as if she were her own private trinket. To his proposal that she move to Profsoiuznaya Street Tanya responded with a hurtful smile, but promised to visit him as soon as she finished her household affairs here.
“Valentina’s living with us now.” Vitalik reported his principal news.
“Why didn’t you bring her along?” Tanya asked with surprise.
“She’ll come. She frequently comes to visit Pavel Alekseevich. You know, all the legal hassles . . . Perhaps they’ll parole him early. The crime is the variety they usually serve only two-thirds of their terms for . . .”
“I should have done something about Ilya Iosifovich’s affairs . . . The whole lot of them, after all, are so amazingly inept,” thought Tanya. But that was unjustified: Valentina was entirely competent, and whatever she did she thought through carefully and carried out to the letter . . .
Tanya slept in Pavel Alekseevich’s study between the laundry basket holding her daughter and the telephone: Sergei called at night, and they would talk at length about everyday nothings, about the little girl, who had not yet been given a name, about the remodeling, and about Poluektova’s borzois, then Sergei would turn on a tape recording so that Tanya could hear the music he had played that day . . . That week he played a lot, almost every evening, because there were New Year’s parties everywhere, and they had a lot of gigs lined up—at institutes, clubs, and cafés . . . On the morning of December 31, Tanya was about to set out for one night in Piter, having tricked Sergei into telling her where he was playing and even bought a ticket for the day train. But such a fierce freeze set in the evening before that Tanya, not having told Sergei about her secret plan, cancelled her trip. She remembered how cold it had been in the train when she returned to Moscow with her newborn daughter. She was frightened that the little girl might catch cold . . . The decision turned out to be more than wise, because Sergei, following the same logic of caprice, or surprise, arrived to spend New Year’s Eve in Moscow and killed the few hours in between at a restaurant at the Leningrad train station . . .