The forensic pathologist—a deformed little Asian with dyed whiskers, was terribly nervous.
“Excuse me, colleague, but we have no grounds for such conclusions. You saw the report, and we gave you an opportunity to conduct an examination of the . . . corpse? body?” Whiskers hesitated for a second, “Patient? What grounds do you have?”
“Focal degeneration with hemorrhaging in the muscles, petechiae. The patient’s records correspond to nothing. There was toxicosis. Intravenous infusions, indicated here, were not administered. I examined the veins . . . I am left to conclude that no treatment whatsoever was given. But that’s not the issue right now. Your maternity hospital is infected with hepatitis.”
Pavel Alekseevich did everything he would have done in any other situation: he called the city health office, summoned the head of the health inspection service, and the chief epidemiologist. A fever ran through the city’s medical administration from top to bottom, to the extent that janitors started scrubbing down toilets twice a day, midlevel medical personnel stopped getting drunk on night duty, and the kitchen kept an eye out to make sure stolen butter and meat were not taken from the premises.
Pavel Alekseevich spent three days at the hospital. On the fourth he boarded a train together with Sergei—who had fallen into spiritual lockjaw and total stupefaction. In the train’s baggage car there stood a zinc coffin with a small rectangular window through which multiple folds of white gauze were visible.
With Garik’s last money—Pavel Alekseevich had spent everything he had, Sergei also—they bought four bottles of vodka. They drank the warm vodka a long time, slowly, a little bit at a time, snacking on pieces of crumbled cookies straight out of the package—there wasn’t anything else—in silence . . . Then Sergei lay down on the lower berth, hugged the case with his instrument hidden away inside, and slept until they reached Moscow. Pavel Alekseevich never closed his eyes once the entire thirty-six hours: he sat opposite the sleeping young man and looked at his tormented face. He was fair-skinned, his eyelids and nose tipped with redness. His thin white stubble broke through the tender skin of his cheeks, forming tiny pustules . . . The corners of his crusted lips twitched. In his sleep he stroked the case and mumbled something. Pavel Alekseevich did not catch the words. He was thinking about how their life had changed when two men had appeared in their home: this dear young man and the little one who was not to be . . . He also thought about what had happened to his daughter: from the moment when a restless spiral had landed in her stomach together with the local rotten water, been absorbed by her mucous membranes, dispersed by the bloodstream throughout her entire body, nested in her highly oxygenated muscles, and poisoned her blood to such an extent that her poor liver, already overtaxed by her pregnancy, had been unable to filter it . . . Pavel Alekseevich needed no auxiliary clairvoyance now: the accursed picture, crude and clear as a picture from a child’s primer, stood before his eyes . . .
Everything had been arranged. Vitalik Goldberg met them at the Kursk train station. At the German cemetery the family burial plot was already open—two steps away from Doctor Haass. There lay Pavel Alekseevich’s grandfather and great-grandfather. And now, interrupting the natural order, Tanya would be placed to rest there. No one besides Tanya’s father, husband, and lover was present at the burial.
Sergei wanted to leave immediately, but Pavel Alekseevich asked him to spend the night. Sergei did. The apartment was empty, summery, dusty. Pavel Alekseevich gave him some sort of pill. They drank vodka. Then Sergei lay down to sleep on Toma’s couch. He, Tanya, Zhenya, and the little boy were supposed to have moved into this room several months later.
22
IN PITER, SERGEI TOLD NO ONE OF HIS ARRIVAL. HE immediately went to the workshop. He did not have keys: they were back in Odessa with Tanya’s things. He easily picked the lock. There was the same mess they had left when leaving. A coffeepot abandoned in haste stood unwashed in the sink. A mysterious flower of fungus sprouted from the teapot. Tanya’s black dress hung on a wooden hanger on the wall. Her high-heeled shoes that made her a half-head taller than him stood alongside the narrow couch, one on top of the other . . . On the eve of their departure they had gone to a party at the house of a young director who intended to invite him for some sort of vaguely enticing staging . . . Lord, and the bed wasn’t made either, the striped sheet hanging from the foot of the bed, and the only pillow, which each of them in their sleep dragged to their own side, preserved the indentation of their heads . . .
Sergei sunk his face into the pillow, and the smell scalded him. She was still here. On the white pillow lay one of her dark hairs curled in a spiral. Under the pillow lay her tiny black underpants, pushed to the side. Still dressed in his clothes he lay down on the couch and fell asleep.
He woke up after an indeterminate length of time, drank some water straight from the tap, and pissed in the sink: the toilet was on the stair landing—one for all four basement apartments—and locked. The key to the toilet hung on a nail near the entrance, but Sergei for some reason decided that it was on Tanya’s key ring in Odessa.
He lay down to sleep again, this time having undressed. Tanya’s smell intensified each time he crawled out of the bed and returned to it again. All that remained were her smell and the bunched up nylon underpants. He would keep them for an indeterminate number of days and nights. He fell asleep, then woke up. He drank water from the tap. He pissed in the sink. He had no appetite. His unfed stomach idled.
At long last he crawled out from under the blanket and sat down at Tanya’s workbench. He touched her tools and her moldings. The metal said nothing to him about Tanya. But when he opened the motley tin box with the black stones, he could not tear his eyes from them for a long time. They seemed to have preserved the touch of her hands: polished layered agate, blackish-blue magnetite, rough black nephrite, and his very favorite—the translucent obsidian . . . He selected two at random and put them in his jeans pocket. Then he grabbed his case and walked out of the workshop. The door, not fastened with a hook from inside, flapped in the doorway: the lock was broken. He turned back, found a hammer with a nail remover, and a large nail. He hammered the nail from the outside into the doorframe and with a strike of the hammer bent it so that the door seemed locked. Then he put the hammer under the doormat so that there would be something to extract the nail with when he came back. A strange thought ran through his head: but will I come back?
Poluektova—whom everyone considered a world-class shrew, but whom Sergei knew was still a human being even though she really was a bitch—had assumed that he was stuck in Moscow. Garik had called Piter from Odessa and informed everyone of Tanya’s death. He also had said that Sergei had set off for Moscow with the coffin. All of Seryozha’s friends were certain that he would remain there.
Sergei seemed to have lost the keys to Poluektova’s apartment. In any case, he rang the doorbell, not at all sure that anyone would open the door for him. The door was opened by the mistress herself in full make-up and with hair-sprayed black ballet bun at the top of her head.
“What do you want?” she asked and stopped short. She had not recognized Sergei at first. He was thin with long stubble or a patchy beard, pale and slightly jaundiced, and looking totally deranged. Gray bounded toward him to lick him on the lips . . . He stood in the door, as if he had come there unconsciously, on autopilot.
Poluektova gasped and began shouting in an ugly high-pitched voice, bombarding him with her silly prattle.