As she entered her single flat, Nina was wrapped by its reliable warmth and felt the small irritations of life drop away. Not only was there hot water, but the tap in the bathroom omitted to bark back with its habitual ferocity. And the other day the plumber, surprisingly sober, had fixed the shower by changing the ancient and leaking chrome hose for a shiny new Italian one.
Now, after throwing off her purple sheepskin coat with its furry cowl, she filled the bath with scented herbal foam, just as she used to. She could sink into it, close her eyes and ignore the little icy drops that fell occasionally on her face. She could put some gentle music on, and leave the bathroom door slightly ajar, too – so that the air from the entrance hall kept the big, oval mirror from clouding as it did if she shut the door completely, leaving Nina to wipe it crossly with the end of her thick towel in order to reveal her flushed face, her refreshed chestnut curls rumpled with drying, and her still strong body in its pure and uncomplicated nakedness.
Anyway, even without the music, there was no reason to shut the door. Nobody could see her in the secure seclusion of her little flat, that was like a handy cosmetic box in which all things, both useful and useless, can find their own special place. In Nina’s wardrobe, for instance, hung a forgotten fur coat that once seemed so alive and animated that it begged to be stroked and spoken to. In the living room, that was at the same time a bedroom and a studio, there was her computer, her books and paintings. And on the kitchen wall dangled the shiny gold circle of a frying pan, with a long polished handle, in which she’d had such fun in former times making gooseberry jam.
To a casual visitor, Nina’s apartment block might look like a grim fortress tower where someone might hide from the inevitable grievances of being. But Nina didn’t encourage visitors. On her salary from the advertising agency, she could actually have afforded a bigger place, but in her personal retreat nothing annoyed or disturbed her. The flat suited Nina because it was a perfect fit, like the bathroom, for her new routine of life. She could draw the drapes on her eighth floor windows, leave just the kitchen light on and a candle burning in front of the tiny icon of the Mother of God brought from Cyprus, undress entirely, wrap herself in a dressing gown, take the few steps to the bathroom and slide into the piping hot water.
As she lay in the bath, the sensation of the water suddenly took her back to some long forgotten time when she was a child. Clear blue sky. Vest, knickers, a panama hat. A host of evocative smells. And the dark, smooth path to the bathhouse, over nettles and star-shaped night blindness10 with its soft hairs, past dense thickets of raspberry-red fireweeds, past yellow tansies and lacy snow-white lungwort. Young pines exuding a rich aroma of sun. Lacewings and pop-eyed dragonflies flitting and hovering in the shimmering air. Behind was the carved wooden verandah of the kindergarten’s dacha, from which they were led in small groups to bathe nearby in the spacious borrowed bathhouse on the fringes of the village. Beyond the bathhouse spread a vast field, green with ears of wheat but splashed blue with cornflowers, wheat waving in the breeze – going on, on, on, right to the far blue sky, never ending, like the life within the ripening seeds. And finally that pure sensation of the skin stepping into the water – so sharp, bright, wonderful. As she lay in the bath, Nina, held by the imperishable spirit in her, waited for it all to flood back to her. But not this time.
Now the shock of the water reminded her of something completely different – the foggy, pre-winter lane from the dacha where that afternoon she had parted from her husband for the week again. It was three years now they had been living apart, without thinking about divorce – he, a physicist working in the defence industry in some institutional settlement in the Moscow suburbs, while she, who remembered Moscow’s dissipation, moved into the centre. ‘I am a bad physicist and a bad wife …’ she joked with that old phrase, culled from a sixties movie. Even now, they understood each other better than anyone else, but life was turning out in such a way that they saw each other only at weekends. It was always Nina who visited him, either at the settlement, or at the dacha if the weather was ok.
Today, an old friend they hadn’t seen for some time dropped in at the dacha. Yet as the conversation gained momentum, Nina had suddenly got up to rush back to Moscow. Aleksei walked her to the car, and then stood for some time watching the car rumble off down the lane. Finally, he vanished from her sight in the rear-view mirror – along with the little cluster of houses; along with the neat rows of American maples, their branches hung with propeller seeds that looked like dragonflies’ wings; along with the bridge across the black, icy still flowing river. And after that came the slipway on to the main road.
There was a time when Nina had really loved that road. On each side spread vast, open fields, and the river was sporadically visible on the right, its banks picked out by pale bundles of ginger grass, by the thin, drooping black branches of weeping birches, and by stunted willows from which withies protruded like scribbles smeared in pencil in a child’s sketchbook. Alongside the road marched groves of purplish, glaucous-leaved trees, mixed with the odd cloud of dark green spruce.
Nina was driving fast, mechanically sliding past the naked winter trees in the raking rays of the equally unconscious setting sun, as the groves darkened and thickened, merging with the damp, descending dusk. The twilight spaces flooded with a dank silence and the first flurries of snow slanted across the fields. Good, Nina thought, wanting precisely the soft, longed for calm whiteness of nature at rest, a natural refuge for the pain of her unseen mental torpor. The aching depths of that autumn soil, she hoped, would soon be buried – sweetly, thoughtlessly, benumbed – and there would be no more need to live, to labour, to give birth throughout the long, fierce, icy winter, while above in the pure, white snow-swept fields, shivering spikes of wormwood11 would turn dark-gold in the setting sun.
How sad it is, how thick the mist …
Wrapping her head with a towel, Nina suddenly caught herself humming an old romance – the one her husband had started today on the guitar. It was at that moment she’d suddenly remembered she had to get to Moscow. He, bless him, didn’t get offended or act surprised, but put aside the battered instrument, a veteran of many hiking trips, and went with her to the car. Now the words from that romance appeared on her lips by themselves and she, just as suddenly as she’d wanted to escape from the chatter in the dacha, wanted to banish the now oppressive silence by singing aloud, with the backing of the karaoke machine she had bought on impulse. Nina switched on the electronic orchestra, picked up the microphone and, sensing the beat, started to sing.
And the past seems a dream …
Nina sang, and the snow flew outside the window, and the orchestra boom-boomed on and on with its relentless rhythm. The mechanical pop tempo was a little too fast for Nina, so she couldn’t sing with the proper expression. It is the accompanist who must listen to the singer sympathetically. But sadly a karaoke machine has no sympathy. Still, you don’t have to talk to it. You don’t have to share the unconscious impulses of the all-enduring heart. You can, without offending anyone, simply fling the microphone on the armchair and walk to the window to gaze at the snow again from behind the curtain.
That snow was tirelessly covering Moscow, and in the suburbs everything was maybe already white, whitening the darknesses and the endless nooks and open spaces in which no soul could find an earthly answer to their prayers or relief for that unbearable, for Nina, poignancy; nor was there any consolation in the candle guttering weakly in front of the Cypriot icon of she who, as Nina was told, in the very death of her son found comfort and example, and her own immortality.
Snow flew, flew and fell – in big fluffy flakes now. The pavements began to turn white and even the ugliest trees near the block were transformed by slipping on snow-white furs for a while. Snow clung to their branches, lodged in their forks in moist threads, and sat like white dough on their gleaming, naked twigs. But whenever too much snow piled up, it collapsed with a thump to the pavement beneath, and it was becoming clear that the snow wouldn’t stay until
