Pavel Alekseevich was amazed at how skillfully Tanya accompanied; she had obviously not forgotten her music lessons—and this gladdened him.
Sergei diminished the sound, blowing the remnants out of the saxophone, and Elena saw the French curves topple, fade, and dissolve. The young man’s face was not just familiar, but as familiar as if she had memorized it: his thick light brows in a single line, his upper lip hanging slightly over the lower . . . He placed his saxophone alongside the laundry basket, shook his head, ran his fingers through his hair, then threw it back with a familiar gesture . . . His hair is full of sand, Elena thought.
Then Tanya carried the basket with the sleeping baby girl into Pavel Alekseevich’s study, where she and Sergei closed the door behind them, and the guests, passing through the corridor past the door to the bathroom, could hear them laughing. They chatted and laughed for two hours. In the morning Sergei left while everyone was still asleep. Pavel Alekseevich had put Elena to bed and lay down to sleep in the bedroom, in his former spot, without undressing, and slept until late in the day: the night before he had had a lot to drink. Elena practically did not sleep and lay with her eyes open as she recollected where she knew that musician from, and seemed to have remembered . . .
By the end of January the remodeling was finished. The apartment had been renovated, and Vasilisa now could not find anything: the pots, and plates, and vegetable oil all stood in new places, and she so tired of constantly searching that she ultimately took the bread into her pantry, wrapped it in a towel, and kept it in her nightstand. Tanya turned the household over to Toma, stocked up on grains and macaroni, sugar, and flour. She hung new curtains and bought a washing machine . . . Then she announced to Pavel Alekseevich that she was leaving.
“Mama’s grown accustomed to her, leave her with us. When you get your life in order in Leningrad, you can take her,” Pavel Alekseevich implored.
In the space of time that his granddaughter had spent at the apartment he had understood that he had lived to the point in his life when this little baby girl was capable of replacing his entire professional life, his students, his mentees, and, most of all, his patients. No matter what he did at the section—follow the quivering lines of a cardiogram, poke his seeing hands into a hemorrhaging uterus rupture, or palpate a ripe belly—he never forgot for a minute the little girl in the wicker basket. He mentally kept track of her newborn, still not rich time: now she was sleeping, already waking up, sucking, belching, stretching and kicking her little legs, performing the grave act of defecation, then falling asleep again . . . His sole and constant desire was to be alongside her basket, alongside the little girl who emitted infantile radiation and sweet slumber. She still had very little individuality, but her family heritage was beginning to show through: her eyebrows were long, and several little hairs stuck out in that same place where the family brush would eventually grow. She sort of reminded you of a hedgehog: a long nose and locks of hair clumped together in little needles . . . But her forehead was Goldberg’s high forehead . . .
Tanya had been two years old when she had come into Pavel Alekseevich’s life, and she had been a beautiful and tender child, kindhearted and trusting, while this tiny mite was almost without any character at all; she did not have to capture her grandfather’s heart, she had simply from birth been imbued with power over Pavel Alekseevich, and he relished sitting alongside her basket, helping Tanya bathe her, touching her little red unwalked-on feet. It was a purely natural feeling that needed neither justification nor explanation, like a lion loving a lion cub, a wolf a wolf pup, and an eagle an eaglet . . . At this point, he discovered, pedagogy of any sort is nonsense and cold rationalism, and when pedagogy begins, what recedes is this natural feeling, this profound animalistic sense of love for one’s young . . . The lowest of all high emotions . . .
“I say that absolutely seriously. We’ll match her up with donor breast milk. Tomorrow I’m turning in my resignation . . .”
“Dad, what are you saying?” Tanya gazed at her father’s wrinkle-lined face and caught an expression she had never seen in it before—entreaty. It made her feel uneasy, and she became indignant: “What are you talking about? I can’t imagine you retired! You’re going to make her porridge, are you? Take her for walks in her stroller?”
He nodded. “Uh-huh. With pleasure. Tanya, I’ve spent too little time on the family. And now’s just the time. Mama and I will take her for strolls.”
“Mama’s totally out of it,” Tanya responded gloomily.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure . . .”
Tanya embraced his neck and tickled him behind his ears.
“Dad, you’re fantastic, really. I’ll bring the baby girl to you, for sure. You know I want to have a lot of children. Girls and boys, five of them.”
Pavel Alekseevich clenched Tanya’s hands, wasted on laundry and remodeling, kissed them, and went to the kitchen to down an absolutely necessary dose: three-fourths of a medium-size, broad-faceted glassful. The gears were turning in his aging head: why of all the tens of thousands of children he had brought into the world, saved, and even planned through his own intuition, was this baby girl and the other two or three Tanya planned to have so dear? I can’t even say that it’s blood . . . There’s no blood, no parentage, nothing but the irrational, inexplicable, capricious, and good-for-nothing call of the heart . . .
Tanya was in a hurry. She had a whole list of things to do, which she crossed out one after the next—the ineradicable habit of a responsible and organized human being . . . The most expensive and labor-consuming task was replacing all the plumbing fixtures, including the bathtub, which had become unusable of late because of a constant leak; the most delicate task was getting her daughter baptized. Vasilisa was commissioned as expert to arrange this sacred procedure, with Toma as godmother. For starters, Vasilisa flatly refused to go to the St. Pimen Church, which was closest to their house, because it had—in Vasilisa’s mind—besmirched itself in the past with “revisionism”; she suggested they go to some rural church in the far reaches of the Moscow region where a “proper” priest served. Tanya dealt with Vasilisa’s principles with surprising ease, telling her that she would not travel that far and that she was not sure herself how she had got it into her head to baptize the child in the first place, and if there were going to be complications, then she was prepared to give up the notion entirely. At that, Vasilisa pursed her lips and began changing from her trimmed felt boots, which served as house slippers, to her street felt boots with the rubber galoshes . . . The sacrament of baptism was performed at the Church of St. Pimen. From that day on the little girl was designated Evgenia, and Tanya struck the thin cross from her list. All that was left was to give Elena a bath in the new bathtub. It had been more than a year since they had last used the bathtub, taking showers instead, not plugging the drain and rinsing off as quickly as possible so as not to flood the neighbors downstairs.