In the evening, when the train had moored at the Moskovsky train station, the flask was bone-dry and his heart once again rumbled double-time, but inside he felt relieved, because over the course of the trip—while observing out of the corner of his eye the young couple that kept trying to touch each other with a shoulder, an elbow, or a knee—everything had come together of its own in his head. The sole plausible explanation for Tanya’s unreasonable—no matter how you looked at it—behavior was a new romance. He recalled a similar tragic incident in ’46–’47, when a woman confined to bed rest toward the end of her pregnancy—Galina Kroll was her name, a beauty, a colonel’s wife—fell in love with the department assistant, Volodya Sapozhnikov, within a few days of when she was to give birth. Their affair was so wild that by the time Galina and her child were to be released from the hospital she refused to return to her husband and moved in with Volodya. Her husband tracked down the home wrecker and filled him with lead. The poor woman was left with no husband and no lover: one had been murdered and the other put in prison . . . About five years later she came back to see him. After the infertility center had already been founded . . . Galina had married a second time, changed her surname, and spent three years in treatment before she could conceive again. She came to Pavel Alekseevich to give birth to the baby. Her second labor was complicated: a breach presentation . . . For some reason his memory held hundreds and hundreds of cases . . . Thus Pavel Alekseevich prepared himself for a meeting with his daughter and consoled himself with the fact that Vitalik would hardly track anyone down . . .
From the train station Pavel Alekseevich took a taxi; twenty minutes later he was at the maternity hospital. The chief doctor was awaiting him: it wasn’t every day academicians visited an ordinary maternity hospital. He washed his hands and put on his white coat. They took him to the ward where on the second bed from the door lay his thin, dear little girl—who looked more like a teenager, perhaps even a teenage boy—with deep circles under her eyes and swollen lips . . . He did not recognize her immediately, but she, seeing her father, quietly “oh-ed” and flew straight out of bed onto his neck.
They held each other tight: there was no question of either being offended.
“Dad, it’s great that you’ve come . . . You’re a real . . . Tell them to show you our little girl. How’s Mama? What’s Tomka up to?”
He stroked her short-shorn little head, her shoulders, and his hand was amazed by her thinness, and his fingers savored the feel of her sharp shoulder blades . . .
“My silly little girl,” he whispered. The other women in the ward were all eyes. Tanya was a special bird in their ranks: although she had said nothing about herself, over the course of the day public—if not opinion, then suspicion—had formed that the girl was unmarried, a drifter, and something about her was not right . . . Now it turned out that she was special in addition because her father was someone famous . . .
THEY GAVE TANYA A DRESSING GOWN, AND THE TWO OF them set out for the nursery ward. White swaddled bundles just slightly larger than loaves of bread lay in miniature beds that resembled a doll’s.
“Go find her, show her to me,” Pavel Alekseevich whispered.
The local doctor was about to extract herself from the hastily formed procession around him, but he signaled to her: don’t.
It was not much of a riddle: there were little plates with the mothers’ surnames on the cribs, but Pavel Alekseevich peered into each tiny face, hoping to recognize his own among them.
“Here,” Tanya pointed to a baby. Their name was written in violet letters at the foot of the crib . . . The little girl slept. Dark bangs fell on her high forehead, her face was a bit yellow, her nose big, her mouth small and tightly shut. “Beautiful, isn’t she?” Tanya asked possessively.
Pavel Alekseevich lifted the swaddled bundle out of the crib, and his heart ached: our baby . . . Then he stuck his little finger into the corner of the diaper folded inward from the back, and placed the bundle on the changing table. The little girl opened her mouth with a little smack and squeaked. Pavel Alekseevich extracted her from her diapers, pulled aside her undershirt . . . straightened out her legs, leveled them, turned her over on her tummy with the same dexterous movement women use to turn pancakes on a frying pan, compared the folds under her barely defined buttocks, probed her pelvis joint—he knew this was a genetic weak spot—and held the little girl up by her legs . . . He ran his finger down her spine, probed the nape of her neck, the top of her head, then once again turned her on her back. Then he felt her protuberant stomach and pressed his finger alongside the bandaged stalk of her umbilical cord.
“Fresh as they come,” he murmured. “Her liver is slightly enlarged—infantile jaundice, nothing terrible. You haven’t forgotten everything yet? Do you understand what’s happening there? The fetal hemoglobin is breaking down . . .” He placed three fat fingers on the left side of her chest. Then he took the tiny hand, straightened the fist, and touched the soft nails, which were bent at the edges.
“Stethoscope,” he tossed out into space, and immediately, as if out of thin air, a metal disk with ear tubes appeared.
He listened for a minute.
“Normal. It seemed to me at first that her little nails were a bit blue. But her heart is just fine. At least there’s no defect.”
The little girl grabbed at his finger, looked at him with her milky—like a kitten’s—eyes, and moved her upper lip. Tanya watched all these manipulations as if bewitched: her father with the infant in hand somehow reminded her of Sergei with his saxophone—the same tenderness and assurance in the way they held them, the same freedom of movement and ease of touch . . .
“A marvelous little baby. I like this kind the best: tiny, firm, and with good musculature . . . You know, she’s not of your breed. She’s a Goldberg. I’m going to send a telegram to the camp to tell him, make him happy,” he whispered quietly in Tanya’s ear. “Congratulations, my little girl . . . In a day or two we’ll gather your stuff and take you home.”
Tanya had not thought of going to Moscow, but at that moment—either out of postpartum fatigue or owing to her father’s total assuredness and belongingness in this place alongside the newborn little girl—she agreed readily.
“We’ll go, but not for long. I’m moving to Piter. I have a . . .” she pondered for a minute how to explain to her father what precisely she had here. “Everything I need is here.”
Pavel Alekseevich nodded understandingly. “That’s what I thought.”
17
Dear Sergei!
How my hand enjoys writing your name! How your name suits you; it’s the only one for you. But it could have been Vitalik or Gena . . .
Greetings, Sergei!
Congratulations to you on having me and to me on having you. Everything about my existence today is different from yesterday. I had a little girl. It looks like we were terribly deceived, and she got substituted for a little boy. But she is very beautiful, everyone says, she looks like me. Keep in mind, I’m going to need a little boy soon. A little boy who looks like you. The fact that the little girl doesn’t resemble you and could not resemble you makes her a not very interesting creature for me. That is, I like her. They brought her to me today. She is touching and darling, but in some way—I can admit this to you—she is particularly dear to me as a witness to our love, as a witness to your caresses. As a secret participant even. I think that she will love you terribly, in a way that will be torturous for me.