Meanwhile, Lydia Grigorievna was in raptures. Nina learned from her that those shows were the biggest hits of the season. “The city is talking of nothing else!” exclaimed the woman. Not wishing to be impolite, Nina praised what she saw and cast sidelong glances at her father trying to understand what he found in all that.
Yevgeniy Borisovich was in high spirits – his life was getting back on track and the two women who were dear to him seemed to be getting on finally. Nina did not question him about his company’s affairs, and he hardly ever mentioned them of his own accord, but when he did, it was in the tone of newly acquired confidence and pride in the business that he had built. Only Nina, who knew all his intonations, was not deceived by that facade of confidence – behind it, she detected his deeply embedded fear and emotional fatigue.
Her father’s optimism was not matched by his appearance, either – he looked unhealthy and older than his age, having grown overweight and short-winded over the past few years. “You must take care of yourself,” Nina pleaded with him. “Go to the swimming-pool. You used to like swimming, didn’t you?” Her father promised absently. Lydia Grigorievna, who was not into sports, believed in herbs – she had a whole program of decoction treatment worked out for Yevgeniy Borisovich. “But, Ninochka, this stuff should be taken at least five times a day, dead on time. Who’s going to see to it when he’s at work?” complained the woman.
Nina and her father scheduled a day for visiting their dacha. However, in the morning of the scheduled day, Nina received an alarmed phone call from Lydia Grigorievna. “Papa has high blood pressure. Ninochka, please, put off your trip.” Nina spoke to her father. At first, Yevgeniy Borisovich refused to change plans. “What kind of invalid are you making of me? I’m as strong as a bull!” he protested. Then he suddenly slackened off, gave in to persuasion and stayed at home.
Nina went to the countryside alone, by suburban train. She had no business at all at the dacha. “It’s just a good way to unbend your mind a bit,” she said to herself following her habit to rationalize everything.
She had not been to the dacha for a few years, and at first, she had difficulty recognizing the dear plank cottage, now almost hidden from view by a thicket of two-meter tall weeds.
“Nina, is that you?” a neighbor hailed her from over the fence. “I’ve been wondering whether it’s you or not. Why, it’s been ages! And where’s your father?” The neighbor had known her since she had been a little girl, and they had been friends at one time, but he had grown old since and looked a stranger now.
Nina opened the cottage and walked about the dark rooms which smelled of a junk shed rather than a human dwelling. She came out into the yard. Everything here was overgrown with giant burdocks. They hid completely the vegetable garden which her mother had once cultivated. Mama was a creative soul and while everyone around grew potatoes, she would try planting something fancy like melons or grapes. Nina’s father built her a hot-house following all the rules of the building science, but in the hot-house either, mama was never able to grow anything. Mama laughed at herself and ventured something else the next year.
At the far end of the plot the black trunks of three apple-trees could be seen. Two of them had long been killed by frost, but to Nina’s surprise, the third one had a few small apples on its branches. She plucked a couple and tasted them. The apples were sour-sweet and astringent – Nina liked them that way.
Among the apple-trees stood a swing. The poles had gone lopsided, the iron bar was rusty, but the seat fastened to a pair of rods was there. Nina cleared the seat of a layer of dead leaves, sat on it and tried to swing. There was an awful screech, but the swing got into motion.
How many times the little girl Nina had swung here – so that her thin legs shot up to the sky! … Now it was a young woman, not a little girl, on the swing. Far from shooting up, she barely moved to and fro, drawing burrows in the carpet of fallen leaves with the tips of her shoes. However, as if by some magic, the swing carried her back to her childhood which had been full of bruises, colds, and little sorrows – but which, as Nina understood now, had been a happy time. The main thing, her mama had been alive then, and she and papa had both been young…
“Mama, mama, where are you?” Nina called in her mind. As she stirred her childhood memories now, she realized that the life of her family had not always been serene. When she first went to school, her father got into some trouble in his syndicate and was suspended from his job. Nina did not understand anything at that time, of course – she only remembered long, worried talks her parents were having and those words, “Papa’s been suspended.” He was reinstated afterwards, and he never discussed any of it with Nina, but mama would sometimes mention that episode as she tried to convince Nina’s father to be more flexible rather than pushing his way through. “Do you want to get suspended again?” she would say.
Things had not always been serene between the two of them, either. There was a time when her father left his wife for another women, and Nina lived with her mama and grandmother who had specially come from Tashkent to help them out. Nina knew her very little as they had hardly ever seen each other before. Then Nina’s father returned to his family, and Nina’s grandmother went back to Tashkent where she had other granddaughters and grandsons. Afterwards, Nina’s parents never referred to that time in Nina’s presence. As a remembrance of Nina’s grandmother, a small carpet of Uzbek craftsmanship was left behind in their home.
It was a life, with all the complications of a life, but Nina’s mama managed almost invariably to turn that life into a feast. Only the feast did not last – mama seemed to have given away to other people all her store of life and joy so that she was unable to live on herself.
A gold medalist of her school and a brilliant student of the financial university, Nina looked slightly down on her mother who had never had any deep mind or logic. Only much later, when she had gone through her first disappointments and dramas, Nina started to realize that her not-very-deep mother had possessed her own knowledge and understanding of things – which she, Nina, did not have and probably would never acquire.
Nina had not forgotten the promises that she had given to her mother in the hospital ward. She kept at least one of them. She had not left her father – she had supported him as best she could – and she was not going to leave him in the future, especially now that she knew how vulnerable he was.
Feeling chilled, she got down from the swing and walked off, but after she had made a few steps, she heard a terrible crack and crash behind her. The swing collapsed – all of it, together with the rotten poles.
Nina was not superstitious or easily scared but that incident left her with a sad feeling, as if yet another thread – be it an illusory one – that had connected her to her past had broken, exposing her solitude and confusion in the face of life. “Mama, mama, where are you?”
One day Nina went to a university friend’s party. The friend and her husband had just moved to a new apartment and a large bunch from their former student group gathered for a house-warming. It was the first time Nina found herself at such a get-together. She was looking into the faces around her with a strange feeling – they were both startlingly familiar and already noticeably different, changed.
Nina was not especially close with anyone in that set, but she enjoyed plunging in the atmosphere of common jokes, recollections and rumors. They gossiped about those of their mates who had got married or divorced, gone abroad or come back. Life was raising or sinking people, spinning them and tossing them about – as a rule, giving them something very different from what they had hoped for in their student years.
Nina was respected here as the most able student in the group and one who had landed the best job among them all after graduation. When she told them that she had left her prestigious investment company for a doubtful bank, they were surprised at first but then nodded and clicked their tongues appreciatively, showing that they understood what kind of dealings she was engaged in now. Trying to dissuade them, Nina told the exact truth – that she was stuck with boring accounting and had committed forgery only once. That caused a burst of laughter.