The second hand of his old—wartime—Swiss watch was completing its meticulous circle, and Pavel Alekseevich automatically counted his pulse. One hundred ninety beats a minute.
He lowered his legs from the bed. Dry sinewy sticks. He pressed his finger against the ball of his foot: not a hint of edema.
“All right, thank God, I have a granddaughter. No more feeling offended. My disappointment is of no significance.”
He sat for a rather long time, waiting for the rhythm of his heart to settle down. “Most likely it’s sinus arrhythmia.” Pavel Alekseevich quickly arrived at a diagnosis.
He stood up and did his nighttime rounds, checking the apartment in which he had lived almost twenty years. A massive old man with a shaved head dressed in old military long johns, his back hunched, made his way along the corridor and turned on the light in the anteroom: the place couldn’t have been more run-down. At first he looked into the girls’ room: there were two beds there. Toma was sleeping on one, while the other, Tanya’s, was piled with a mountain of unironed laundry. Dark masses of leaves billowed disagreeably in the room’s twilight; it smelled of damp earth . . .
He turned down the corridor to the left and looked into their former bedroom, Elena’s room. There was a complex smell of hospital, dust, and some sort of bitter herb.
It was filthy. Their place had become very filthy. Vasilisa’s vision was poor, and she never really had known how to clean right. Toma worked and went to schooclass="underline" the girl had a heavy load. He should ask Praskovia, the cleaning woman in their section, to come by. No, that was impossible: Vasilisa would take offense . . . But you couldn’t put a child in this room. In my study. That’s the optimum choice. And I can clean my place up myself. A crib in the center of the room—there’s plenty of space. I’ll bring a changing table from the section. And immediately apply for retirement. How fortunate, I’ve already turned sixty-five . . .
Elena was not sleeping. She looked at the dark silhouette in the doorway. The light burst from behind his back, and the semblance of a halo had formed around his head and shoulders.
“Is that you?” Elena asked.
Pavel Alekseevich sat down at her feet. Elena had always loved to sleep on high fluffed pillows. Earlier, when he used to sleep on this wide bed, her pillows had stood upright in the left part of the bed, while his little flat one lay on the right . . . He stuck his hand under the blanket and stroked her feet in their silky socks.
“I just got a call from Leningrad: Tanya’s given birth to a little girl.”
“No, no,” Elena interrupted him softly. “I’m the one who’s had the little girl.”
“Tanya has grown up, gotten married, and given birth to a little girl,” Pavel Alekseevich reiterated.
Elena’s eyes flashed brightly in the semidarkness.
“It’s too early. It’s too dark. Where is Tanechka?”
“In Leningrad.”
“Tell her to come in here. I haven’t seen her in a long time . . . Is she at school?”
“Tanechka finished school a long, long time ago. She’s in Leningrad. She’s given birth to a daughter,” Pavel Alekseevich repeated patiently.
“Say something else, Papa,” Elena requested. “I don’t understand that.”
Pavel Alekseevich moved his round stool to the head of the bed. The young Murka, who had arranged herself under Elena’s hand, started and opened one eye. Pavel Alekseevich sat down next to his wife and took her by the hand. Her hand was dry, cool, and almost weightless.
For many years they had called him PA. At work they had pronounced it Pee-A, such was the fashion in those days—to refer to superiors by their initials. At home in the better years of their family life he had been called Pah. But now Pavel Alekseevich wondered whether Elena had taken him for her own father. He held her hand, stroked her fluffy uncombed hair, and decided not to find out who she took him for. It wasn’t all that important . . .
“I’m leaving for Leningrad right now, to see how things are there, and I’ll try to bring them back,” he informed Elena.
“That’s nice,” she sighed. “Tell Tanya to come in.”
Pavel Alekseevich continued, ignoring Elena’s inability to keep up a coherent dialogue.
“It seems to me she’s having some trouble with her husband. Perhaps he offended her somehow. I don’t know. And I don’t intend to ask. Last time Vitaly called was last week. He asked about Tanya, and I told him that she was in Leningrad and was planning to return soon, but that she hadn’t given me her address. What do you think about that?”
Elena was perplexed and began to fret.
“I don’t know, what do you think . . . You yourself . . . I don’t . . .”
“In any case it’s better for her and the child to be at home than just anywhere, don’t you think?” He asked a question that required no more than a nod of the head.
But Elena no longer heard him. She swept her hands anxiously at her sides, and he guessed that she was looking for the escaped Murka, whom she developed a need for whenever she found herself in a difficult situation. The cat sat in a chair, at some distance. He picked it up and put it on the bed near Elena. Elena squeezed it with both hands and smiled. As soon as she touched the animal, she seemed to abandon the space of the bedroom: her gaze became not quite vacuous, but focused somewhere without, beyond the bounds of the here and now . . .
Pavel Alekseevich sat a bit longer, then went to his study and called the information line. It turned out he had plenty of time to make the day train to Leningrad. He took his briefcase and packed a toothbrush, his white hospital coat, and the military flask with diluted alcohol that he always kept in stock at home. He decided not to tell anyone he was leaving, and to call in the evening from Leningrad. He was not worried about finding a place to stay: he had an old friend at whose place he could always stay, and there was the Academy’s hotel on Khalturin Street, where they would always find a room for him . . . He set out for the train station, bought a ticket unexpectedly quickly, and managed to drop in at his clinic as welclass="underline" there was a woman there in critical condition whom he wanted to check on and give the attending physician instructions for . . .
The Leningrad day train traveled an absurdly long time, and Pavel Alekseevich turned out not to have a single book with him. He cast a curious eye toward his fellow travelers—a young couple that kissed surreptitiously—and tried to figure out whether they were older than Tanya . . . Probably they were even younger. Until the darkness set in he looked out the window: the pleasant flickering outside distracted him from his oppressive thoughts. When he was young, his sense of righteousness had been exceptionally important, and many of his actions had been determined precisely by that inner sense. Now he was at a loss: Tanya had acted completely irresponsibly. You have to admit: she abandoned her ailing mother—with no explanation whatsoever. Now, with a kind of maniacal consistency she was making everyone sick with worry—her husband, her father, even Vasilisa . . . She had given birth recklessly and thoughtlessly who knows where; it was unclear where she would go to live with the child, and how she would support it . . . The girl was wrong on all counts.
He, Pavel Alekseevich, could not seem to find himself guilty of anything, but that was irrelevant. He took her wrongfulness on himself and was going to her in order to set wrongs right, to correct what had gone wrong, the abnormities in her life that had come about, after all, through his, Pavel Alekseevich’s, entirely imponderable fault. He reproached himself for his inability to put their lives in order: his wife was ill, his daughter had left home . . . Every time his circular anxious thoughts returned to this juncture he opened his briefcase and took a big gulp from the canvas-covered flask. It was an automatic reaction that had formed at the end of the 1940s when a summons to the ministry or to a meeting at the Academy had promised trouble . . . The hydroxyl group (–OH) near the saturated carbon atom, bless its heart, protected him in its usual way from troubles both external and internal . . .