Finally, they were full and warm. It was time to bed down. There was only one bed in the house, and Nina spread the sleeping bag on it.
“There are some bed clothes up in the attic, but they are surely all damp and moldy, so we’ll have to make do with this,” she said.
She sat down on the bed.
Samsonov who was smoking by the window killed his cigarette. Silently, he rose, crossed the room and sat down beside Nina.
He hung his head, this time not because of drowsiness. He was going to declare his feelings to Nina, but he clearly did not know how to start.
“Nina, I want to tell you that you… I mean, I’ve long been…”
Nina remembered vividly Dima, her unhappy, young ex-husband. “Why on earth are they all so…”, thought Nina.
“Kiss me, Pavel Mikhailovich,” she said.
“Nina…” he whispered as he entered her.
She had feared that he – being so huge – would crush her, but it was nothing like that. His weight was only agreeable to her.
She was connected to him – much more so than she had been once, at a corporate party. She anticipated his movements as if they were her own. At the same time, each movement and each touch of his was a wonderful, happy discovery to her – something that she had been waiting for all her life.
Their bodies were only half covered by the sleeping bag. The flickers of light from the stove were dancing on his shoulders and face. His grey eyes seemed black.
The time halted, and the planet stopped revolving. The whole universe stood still, with only one live spot left in it – a room in a deserted dacha cottage where a woman named Nina was giving herself completely to her man.
She had wished heartily for him to feel good with her but it was she who felt good. A couple of times in her life she had been close to experiencing ecstasy with a man. Now those episodes were infinitely remote and insignificant to her. Anything that she might have had with men had happened to someone else, not her. Her true life started here – she had just been born.
His thrusts almost immediately incited response in her body, her whole being. That response grew and grew and finally burst into a scream.
“Nina, are you all right? Does it hurt?”
“No…”
“You screamed so…”
“I am fine…”
And again he entered her, and again they became a whole, and again she screamed.
“Nina, I love you,” he muttered into her ear during the brief minutes of their rest. “I thought I’d never be able to love anyone…”
“Don’t think,” she whispered stroking his head. “Don’t you think of anything.”
…The fire in the stove went out, but it was hot under their sleeping bag almost until dawn when the chilly dampness crept into the cottage from the outside.
Nina did not have a wink of sleep. When her man fell asleep, she nested beside him, with her head on his powerful shoulder, and listened to his even breathing while watching through the window the black night giving way imperceptibly to an ashy morning.
She did not have a single thought in her mind. All her life she had been proud of her brain, but now it seemed as if she had totally lost the ability to think. Indeed, what did she have to think about if the most important thing had already happened to her?
The sun was rising. A ray of sunlight penetrated the room – first highlighted the far corner, then started approaching imperceptibly their nuptial bed. After a while, it threatened already to fall on the face of her love.
Nina got up and closed the shutters.
The squeak of the wood woke the man.
“What? … What’s the time?”
“It’s early yet. Go to sleep,” Nina quieted him and tucked the sleeping bag that had slipped down from his broad back.
The man turned over onto his other side and plunged into a deep sleep again.
Nina slipped out of the room shutting the door carefully after her. She had to make some breakfast and tidy up the clothes of her man which had got rumpled and soiled during their escape the previous day.
She went out of the cottage and sat on the porch. With a smile on her face she set about doing something that she had long wanted to do. The night before, as she was buying stuff for the journey at the railway station, she picked up a can of shoe polish and a brush. The polish was not the best kind but at least it did not stink like her beloved’s gutalin. It was all over with gutalin – from now on, she was going to take care of her man’s shoes herself.
“Nina, is that you?”
From over the fence, the neighbor was watching her polish a pair of men’s shoes.
“Is Yevgeniy here, too?”
“No, papa is not here,” replied Nina.
The neighbor was intrigued.
“Who’s that with you then?”
Nina smiled, “It’s my husband.”
The neighbor sighed.
“Congratulations. Look at you, Ninka – grown up already. When did you all grow up?”
Nina was sitting in the shuttered room looking alternately at the watch and the sleeping man.
At last, it was ten o’clock. That was it. According to the rules of the contest, all the bids that had been submitted to the committee by that hour were officially accepted. Along with the others, the package of documents that had arrived from Gradbank was now being registered and sealed. Nobody, not even the bank’s general director, could undo that.
The hunt for Samsonov was over – he won.
Nina touched him by the shoulder. “Darling…”
He opened his eyes, stretched sweetly and smiled, “Nina…”
He reached out his arms for her, “Come to me.”
Then his eyes fell on the watch.
“What time is it? … Damn, it’s ten already!”
Samsonov jumped to his feet.
Nina watched him wash hurriedly at the wash-basin, then pull on his trousers and shirt.
“Come have some breakfast. It’s on the table.”
He stepped up and hugged her.
“Sorry, I have to run. Are you going with me?”
“Ah, no, I’m staying. I have some tidying up to do here.”
“Sorry…” He kissed her. “I’ll call you as soon as I sort things out, I swear.”
“Sure.” She smiled and stroked his unshaven cheek.
She tucked some sandwiches into his pocket and walked him to the road where he could catch a car to the railway stop.
He leaned over her.
“Don’t you think that I… As soon as I’m done with this, I’ll…”
She drew his head down and kissed him.
“Go.”
Samsonov hailed a car.
Crossing her arms under her breast in the manner of a peasant woman, she watched her man leave.
Nina was sitting on the porch of the house in which she had spent almost every summer of her childhood, and where the main event in her life had now taken place.
It was another – probably the last – day of the Indian summer. Nina squinted as she held up her face to the caressing sunlight.
She did not know what lay in store for her, neither she wanted to ponder over it. What kind of relationship were she and Samsonov going to have? Was there going to be any relationship anyway? Maybe that night was destined to be the only one?
She could think about all those important matters some other time. At the moment, she could not be bothered – her whole being was absorbed in love. It was a new love – not the painful feeling that had gnawed her for months, but a calm and triumphant happiness. That happy love filled her to the brim.
Be that as it might, she had done what she had had to – what her nature had demanded of her: she had opened her feelings to her man and had given herself to him. Nobody would ever be able to take that away from her.
Nina was not aware how long she had been sitting like that. In was her neighbor that snatched her from her reverie. He hailed her from over the fence: