Tanya’s belly in fact excited Sergei terribly. His marriage to Poluektova, who was abstractly sexual and barren as a rock, had been concluded coldly and straightforwardly. At the outset he had rented a room from her, then he started to bring home kefir and walk her two borzois, then somehow accidentally he found himself in her bed, and married her as a demonstration to the world, mostly his parents, of his total independence from everyone. At one time the retired ballerina had attracted him with her complete lack of resemblance to anything he had known before; Tanya now attracted him with her perception of the world, which coincided entirely with his, as did the course of her thoughts, the turns in her emotions, and, most of all, her protestant thirst for the truth, which in practice played out as protest against any kind of falsehood, be it official or everyday.
“We have total synergy at the molecular level.” Tanya stated this surprising fact, and Sergei agreed.
The tiny thing in the middle of Tanya’s belly got in absolutely no one’s way. Tanya said that her son was happy because she had found him a proper father. Sergei did not object to this either.
There was also one other, profoundly intimate circumstance. For all her impudent spirit—being with a child that had resulted from a charitable act and touchingly uninhibited in her examinations of male anatomy, to which she had not condescended in her earlier experience—Tanya, as she candidly admitted to Sergei, until that summer had never known the not exclusively human delight that any living creature from earthworm to hippopotamus experiences as the direct result of the friction of mucous glands against mucous glands, producing a powerful release of the central nervous system.
“It’s the most fundamental difference between men and women: men can achieve it with anyone and at any time,” Tanya philosophized drowsily.
“You’re mistaken, I know a lot of women who can achieve it with anyone,” Sergei objected.
“But for some reason I don’t want to continue exploring how many men in the world I can achieve it with. I think I’ll stop with you.”
“Just keep in mind that others have already stopped with me.” Sergei laughed.
From time to time Tanya called Vitalka and her father in Moscow. It was impossible to get through to Obninsk: Gena’s laboratory had one landline for the entire floor, and the person on duty in the dormitory would not call people to the phone in the evening. It was precisely Gena Tanya really wanted to talk to, to tell him that she had fallen head over heels in love and was not planning to return to Moscow. She didn’t have the resolve to tell either her father or Vitalka that: Vitalka was too vain, and her father too logical and serious. As it was, he was demanding that she return immediately, shouting into the receiver that the end of the seventh month was particularly dangerous, and that she was putting the child at risk.
“He’s doing well, Daddy! And I’m doing well! We’re so well! We’re going to stay here just a little bit longer!” She held the phone with one hand and Seryozha’s hand with the other.
“Should I send money?” Pavel Alekseevich asked.
“No money. Don’t send any money. Day after tomorrow I’m going to Sukhumi!” she shouted joyfully, while Pavel Alekseevich, once the phone call was over, went to his study to down a glass of tranquilizer. He in fact was very worried: Tanya had her mother’s build, the same narrowness of the lower pelvis, and there was danger the pelvic bones might separate. She should be confined to bed rest.
It could never have entered Pavel Alekseevich’s head that she would not return to Moscow to give birth, but would remain to deliver her child in some other city, into a stranger’s hands.
But that was precisely how it happened. The tour, having begun successfully in Yalta and met with even greater success in Odessa, achieved the pinnacle of success in Sochi. In Sukhumi they were received considerably less enthusiastically, and in Batumi they gave only two of the four scheduled concerts. Scorching Adzharia gave them a cold reception, partly because it was the beginning of the tangerine harvest season, and so they left, breaking their semilegal contract. Garik was anxious to send Tanya home, but she kept finding pretexts not to go, until he just gave up.
Over the past month Tanya had noticeably put on weight, and the child would go for days without making himself known, then suddenly make such a fuss inside that it felt as if there were a whole pack of children in there. At night Sergei would put his hand on her stomach and feel a heel or a fist thrashing and with entirely distinct outlines.
“I could give birth to twins,” Tanya threatened Sergei, but he was lighthearted and without a care.
“What difference does it make? If it’s twins, it’s twins. One gray, one white, two happy geese.” He clapped her on her swollen side, pressing his lips to her thin skin stretched to its maximum from within, and his attraction to the future child’s domicile not only did not wane, but, on the contrary, increased.
“I like it so much, I love it so awfully much. You will always be pregnant and having babies with me . . . Like Natalia Nikolaevna . . .” Like all Petersburgers, he did not invoke Goncharova’s surname—there was no need. “Abortions are abominations. When she was young, Poluektova got herself scraped every three months. Ballet dancers don’t have babies. But you and I will never do that . . . Never . . . It’s so beautiful. Carefully . . . very carefully . . . I won’t hurt you . . .”
Up until the moment she gave birth they were unable to tear themselves apart from each other.
Tanya did not return to Moscow. She flew to Leningrad at the end of October. They had no place to live. Initially they crashed with Tolya Aleksandrov, the drummer. Long ago his family had been allotted communal living space in the former living room (with three pseudo-Italian windows) of a grand apartment on the corner of Pestel Street and Liteiny Avenue, but the huge room had already been partitioned off with wooden walls into four long pencil cases with three-fourths of a window in each. True, following the deaths of his mother and grandmother Tolya came into two whole rooms, and now he let one of them to his friends. The money earned on the tour quickly ran out, and so they lived together with Tolya as one needy family. Tanya fried potatoes, did the laundry, cleaned the neglected rooms, and listened to the music, that same unceasing sound track that she had learned to hear during their travels . . .
In the middle of December an ambulance took Tanya to a maternity hospital. They did not want to accept her without documentation from a women’s clinic. All she had with her was her passport with her Moscow registration and labor pains. While admissions was scolding her for being so irresponsible, her water broke, and there was nothing left to do but place the woman in labor on a cart and take her to the delivery room. The baby was delivered by one of those midwives taught by Pavel Alekseevich at advanced qualification courses at the institute, and, seeing the renowned last name on a hastily written piece of paper, the midwife asked Tanya if she was related to Doctor Kukotsky. Once she learned that she was his daughter, the midwife never left her side and at the end of the tenth hour of labor—which was good, even quick, for a first delivery—received her little girl with rather long black hair.
When she heard that she had a daughter, Tanya cried bitterly. Never had she been so profoundly disappointed . . .
The midwife who had performed the delivery called Moscow, tracked down Pavel Alekseevich’s home phone number, and congratulated him on the birth of a granddaughter.
16
PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH PUT DOWN THE RECEIVER. HIS HEART suddenly drained, skipped a beat, then burst into a drumroll.
“Oh-ho, one hundred eighty beats a minute,” he estimated. “Paroxysmal tachycardia . . .” He reached for his watch—half past four. A night girl. Born between midnight and late sunrise. December 16. The darkest days of the year. Close to the solstice.