“That’s good, Elena Georgievna.”
Pavel Alekseevich was stunned: it was one of those cases where the part was larger than the whole; her eyes were so much larger than her face.
“Was it you I saw there?” she asked Pavel Alekseevich.
Her voice was weak, as thin as paper.
“That’s entirely possible.”
“And where’s Tanechka?” she asked, but did not hear the answer as she once again floated into colored spots and talking plants.
“Tanechka, Tanechka, Tanechka,” the voices sang, and Elena calmed down. Everything was as it should be.
After a while she regained consciousness for good. Everything came together: her illness, the operation, the ward. The attentive doctor who had not let her die.
Vasilisa Gavrilovna visited her. A white film covering one eye, her dark headscarf tied low over her brow, she brought Elena cranberry juice and dark-colored cookies. Twice she brought Elena’s little daughter.
The doctor at first came by twice a day, then, later, as for the others, only during morning rounds. The screen was removed. Elena now began to get up, like the other patients, and to make her way to the washroom at the end of the corridor.
Pavel Alekseevich kept her in the ward for three months.
At the time, Elena was renting a corner of a room behind a calico curtain in a rotting little wooden house on the outskirts of town. The landlady, who also appeared to be rotting, was exceptionally quarrelsome. She had already evicted four tenants before Elena. The Siberian city that before the war had boasted barely fifty thousand inhabitants now burst at the seams with evacuees: the employees of a munitions factory and of the design office where Elena worked, the staff and students of a medical school and its clinics, and two theater companies. Except for the prisoners’ barracks in an immediate suburb, no housing had been built in the town since the Soviets had come to power. People were packed like sardines in every crack and corner.
On the eve of Elena’s release the doctor arrived at her apartment in an official automobile, with a chauffeur. Frightened by the car, the landlady hid in the pantry. Vasilisa Gavrilovna responded to the knock at the door. Pavel Alekseevich said hello and was struck by the smell of slops and sewage. Not removing his sheepskin coat, he took three steps inside, pulled back the calico curtain, and glanced inside at their beggarly nest. Tanya sat in the corner of a big bed with a big white kitten and looked at him in fright, and with curiosity.
“Quickly collect all your things, Vasilisa Gavrilovna. We’re moving to different quarters,” he said, surprising himself.
Moving a high-risk patient who had miraculously survived to this garbage heap was out of the question.
Fifteen minutes later their entire household had been packed into a large suitcase and cloth bundle, Tanya was dressed, and three maidens, kitten included, sat in the back seat of the car.
Pavel Alekseevich took them to his place. The clinic occupied an old mansion, and Pavel Alekseevich’s quarters were in an annex in the courtyard. It had once been the mansion’s kitchen and the servants’ quarters. The large stove had been repaired and was used to cook food for the patients, the space had been partitioned, and Pavel Alekseevich had been allocated two tiny rooms with a separate entrance. In one of those rooms he now settled this family. His future family.
The first evening, left alone with Tanechka—Elena would be released only the next day—Vasilisa, having said her prayers as usual, lay down alongside the sleeping girl on the rigid medical examining couch and was the first to figure out where all this was headed . . . Ah, Elena, Elena, with a husband who’s still alive.
Vasilisa Gavrilovna confirmed her suspicions the next day when, after crossing the courtyard, Elena first entered Pavel Alekseevich’s house. Weak and pale as a ghost, she smiled somewhat vaguely and perplexedly, even a bit guiltily. But that day Vasilisa Gavrilovna had no grounds for suspicions or reproaches—those would come several days later. Amazing how this old spinster with not the least experience of relations with the male sex could be so attuned to the stirrings of love still in the bud.
All February it was bitterly cold. Pavel Alekseevich’s quarters were well heated, and for the first time in several months the women knew warmth. Possibly, it was the dry heat of wood the women had so missed that warmed Elena’s feelings. Whatever the reason, the love she felt for Pavel Alekseevich attained degrees she had never known before. From the summits of a new realization of love and of herself, her marriage to Anton Ivanovich now seemed flawed, artificial. She drove from her mind the tiny, dim thought of her husband, and day after day put off the minute when she would have to tell herself the sad truth, all of which was exacerbated by the fact that no letters had arrived from Anton for almost six months, and she herself had not written to him for a month so as not to write the truth or lie to him.
At half past five every morning Pavel Alekseevich brought a bucket of warm water from the hospital kitchen—a luxury as inconceivable then as a bathtub full of champagne in other times—and waited behind the door while Elena bathed. Then he bathed, brought a second bucket for Vasilisa Gavrilovna and Tanechka, and tossed more firewood into the stove, which they stoked almost incessantly. Vasilisa sat in the other room until both of them left for work, pretending to be asleep. Elena knew that Vasilisa was an early bird who began her devotional muttering still in the middle of the night.
She doesn’t come out because she doesn’t want to witness my disgrace, Elena surmised. And smiled.
In the morning she felt especially happy and free. She knew that on the way to the plant everything would slowly begin to fade and that by day’s end not a trace of her morning happiness would remain: as evening approached, her sense of guilt and shame mounted and did not pass until Pavel Alekseevich took her into his strong nighttime embrace . . .
Pavel Alekseevich was forty-three years old. Elena was twenty-eight. She was the first and only woman in his life who did not drive away his gift. The first night she spent in his room, he woke up in the darkness before dawn with her tickly braid spread along his forearm and said to himself: “Enough! So what if I never again see what other doctors can’t see. I don’t want to let her go . . .”
Although a misogynist, for Elena, odd as that was, his gift had made an exception. In any case, Pavel Alekseevich continued to see the colored glimmer of life hidden inside the body just as he had before.
Probably IT had fallen in love with her too, Pavel Alekseevich concluded.
NOTIFICATION OF THE DEATH OF ELENA’S HUSBAND, Anton Ivanovich Flotov, arrived a month and a half after she had spent her first night in Pavel Alekseevich’s room. The notice came in the morning, after Elena had already left for the plant. Vasilisa cried herself dry over the course of the day; she had never liked Anton and now she reproached herself particularly for her dislike.
That evening she placed the notice in front of Elena. Elena turned to stone. For a long time she just held the flimsy yellowish piece of paper in her hand.
“My God! How can I live with this?” Elena pointed a finger to the large, clumsily printed numbers of the date of death. “Do you see what date it was?”
It was the same day she had spent her first night with Pavel Alekseevich.
By this time Pavel Alekseevich’s broad back in neat surgical dressing gown with ties at the base of his powerful neck had come to shield her from the rest of the world as well as from the perished Anton with his cool eyes and rigid mouth set against a thin face entirely deprived of any Slavic fleshiness.
From that moment on her love for Pavel Alekseevich would be forever tinged with a feeling of incorrigible guilt before Anton, killed the same day she had betrayed him . . .