“You earned it. Over twenty years, you deserve it. Here you are, still fetching him his food, his drinks, doing his washing. For free, mind you. So what if you used to work for him for real. And so what if he was a big fish. Your professor, he’d’ve died a long time ago if it wasn’t for you. So he should be thanking you he’s still alive.”
Stepan’s hands grip Grunya’s shoulders. The clock on the wall ticks audibly.
“But you and me, maybe we’ll be expanding later, too. Even when he’s gone, what’re we going to do – spend our lives huddled in two measly rooms?”
She closes her eyes and presses her ear to his rough, hairy hand. His fingers move toward the base of her neck, then further, toward the opening in her dress.
“Now then, Grushenka,” he whispers quietly, “now then, my little apple…”
The bell by the front door squawks shrilly. One ring is for the professor. The last time anyone came to see him was five or six years ago, some skinny old man passing through from Moscow to Siberia who invited the professor to teach in Tomsk, though Leibe turned him down.
Grunya leaps up. Her eyes meet Stepan’s tense gaze and she presses a hand to her mouth: Could it be them? Stepan motions angrily with his chin: Open it up. What are you standing there for? She runs into the hallway, putting the unfastened buttons on her dress collar back through their holes along the way. She feels Stepan’s heavy gaze behind her, beating at the back of her head from the doorway. She rattles the locks and chains for a long time, then her fingers finally cope with her nervousness. Grunya exhales with a gasp and reaches to open the heavy front door.
Ilona’s standing, shifting from one little heel to another and lowering her hat brim slightly over her eyes. Shameful, my God, how shameful…
A mountain of a woman opens the door. She’s breathing deeply and menacingly, like a dragon. She’s silent and her beady eyes are looking at Ilona.
“I’m here to see Professor Leibe,” Ilona says, exhaling feebly.
The mountain of a woman jabs her chin at the air, indicating a white door in the dimly lit hallway behind her. She doesn’t move from her place, though: she stands, blocking the way. Ilona presses a flat little purse to her chest like a shield and edges into the apartment, feeling faint from the thick smell of onions and porridge issuing from this woman. She wants to duck behind the white door but the menacing keeper of the threshold cuts off her passage with an arm. “I’ll announce you,” her deep voice says with loathing before she goes into the room. Ilona is left by herself in the stuffy brown dusk of the hallway.
A bright rectangle – the entrance to the kitchen – is somewhere far ahead and from it carry the smells of laundry and lunch and the sounds of the hum of female voices, children’s laughter, and a jingling bicycle bell. Along the hallway, barely discernible in the darkness, are tall doors to rooms; their white paint has partially flaked off, like fish scales. Ilona thinks someone’s hiding behind them and observing. She darts off with grateful relief when the professor’s door finally swings open and the portly woman’s deep voice invites her to enter.
Volf Karlovich Leibe, prof. med. in gyn., luminary!: that’s the note Ilona discovered in her mother’s diary when she went through her things after the funeral. The word “luminary” was underlined twice. Blushing from speculation about why her mother required a “prof. med. in gyn.,” she put away the notebook, which had disintegrated into sheets, in an upper storage cabinet. She only remembered it several years later when she was tossing and turning in bed, sleepless as usual. The bed was cooling after Ivan had left and she was agonizing over guesses as to why, after reaching the age of twenty-five, she had never once… And how could she find the right words to say that while maintaining decorum?
Her girlfriends were living the full lives of Young Communist League members by falling in love, acquiring suitors – Komsomol or Party members, or shock workers at the very least – finding new ones, marrying and divorcing, and losing count of abortions. Some had even given birth to tiny pink children who screeched in horrendous voices.
Ilona had observed all those maelstroms and tangles of female fates from the sidelines, during breaks from pounding on the keyboard of a good old-fashioned Underwood, behind whose cumbersome bulk she cleverly and unobtrusively hid from life in a small office.
She’d had few suitors and nobody had asked her to marry them. No, it wasn’t really “few.” Of course there were suitors. And they gave her womanly happiness, in the ways and amounts they could. She thirstily drank every drop of that happiness. But she hadn’t become pregnant (what a scary word!). Her womb was a bottomless vessel that accepted everything that fell into it but lacked the power to give anything back to this world. Policeman Fedorchuk, a charming, brawny fellow, was swarthy, curly-haired, dark-eyed, and irrevocably married; bookkeeper Zeldovich was prematurely bald and gray, and loved to sleep nestled into her chest; the chemistry student with the funny surname Obida had traces of eternal hypochondria on his face… They had all floated through her iron bed with the shiny knobs on the headboard – and through her life, too – without leaving a trace. And that hadn’t concerned her a bit.
Then, suddenly, there was Ivan. Vanya.
What errant wind had blown that tall, broad-shouldered looker with the arrogant gaze and upright posture into her dusty life, so reliably protected by a typewriter? Ilona latched on to him tenaciously, with all the strength of her pale fingers worn out from constant battles with the keyboard. She laughed loudly at the cinema with her head thrown back high; she blazed with shame when she put on her mother’s chiffon blouse, transparent in the bright light, for an evening stroll; she tried to be passionate and tireless at night; she sewed two buttons on his uniform tunic; and she even mastered her grandmother’s recipe for preparing thick Sunday pancakes.
In the heat of a recent argument, he’d thrown some enigmatic words about love for children in her face, as if he’d lashed her cheek. Could this stern military man with the cold gray eyes really want familial coziness and children?
Her mother’s photograph on the bureau looked at her implacably: Don’t give in! Ilona searched for the castoff notebook in the dusty abyss of the upper storage cabinet and after her trembling fingers found the sought-after address in the folds of its yellowed pages, she headed for “prof. med. in gyn.” Vanya wants children; she’ll bear them for him. If she can, of course.
The luminary could have closed his practice, changed his address, or, yes, simply grown old and died in the years that had passed. But – what enormous, improbable luck! – he still lived here, guarded by that chained-up dog, the mountain-like woman with the gaze of a hungry she-bear.
And so now Ilona is standing in the middle of the room, timidly looking downward, and the rather eccentric professor is hurrying to greet her. The hems of his quilted satin robe are fluttering and his shaggy curls form a semicircle – a halo, it occurs to her! – around a high, shining forehead that flows to the back of a head that’s just as smooth. His lips press her hand, which flushes instantly with heat, since nobody has ever kissed Ilona’s fingers, not even the extraordinarily affectionate policeman Fedorchuk, and this is so unceremonious, in the presence of others.
“Thank you, Grunya,” the professor says in a singsong voice.
The disappointed she-bear woman releases air from her voluminous chest, slowly turns around, and carries her bulky body out of the room.
The professor courteously points a withered hand at a chair with curved wooden legs and varnished armrests that are reminiscent of éclairs at the Gorzin bakery. Ilona, who still hasn’t dared raise eyelashes heavy with mascara, perches herself on the edge of a seat upholstered in flowered satin. Something small and sharp pierces the very top of her leg. A nail? She decides to tolerate it and not let on.