Mr. President. I think we should both know the answer to that."
"Dimitri Yurl Yurievich!" roared the buxom woman good naturedly as she approached the bed, a breakfast tray in her hand. "It's the first morning of your holiday. The snow is on the ground, the sun is melting it, and before you shake the vodka from your head, the forests will be green again!" The man buried his face in the pillow, then rolled over and opened his eyes, blinking at the sheer whiteness of the room. Outside the large windows of the dacha, the branches of the trees were sagging under the weight of the snow.
Yurievich smiled at his wife, his fingers touching the hairs of his chin beard, grown more gray than brown. "I think I burned myself last night," be said.
"You would have!" laughed the woman. "Fortunately, my peasant instincts were inherited by our son. He sees fire and doesn't waste time analyzing the components, but puts it out!" "I remember him leaping at me." "'He certainly did." Yurievich's wife put the tray on the bed, pushing her husband's legs away to make room for herself. She sat down and reached for his forehead. "You're warm, but you'll survive, my cossack." "Give me a cigarette." "Not before fruit juice. You're a very important man; the cupboards are filled with cans of fruit juice. Our lieutenant says they're probably there to put out the cigarettes that burn your beard." "The mentality of soldiers will never improve. We scientists understand that. Tbe cans of juice are there to be mixed with vodka." Dimitri Yurievich smiled again, not a little forlornly. "A cigarette, my love?
I'll even let you light it." "You're impossible!" She picked up a pack of cigarettes from the bedside table, shook one out and put it between her husband's lips. "Be careful not to breathe when I strike the match. We'd both explode, and I'll be buried in dishonor as the killer of the Soviet's most prominent nuclear physicist." "My work lives after me; let me be interred with smoke." Yurievich inhaled as his wife held the match. "How's our son this morning?" "He's fine. He was up early oiling the rifles. His guests will be here in an hour or so. The hunt begins around noon." "Oh Lord, I forgot about that," said Yurievich, pushing bimself up on the pillow into a sitting position. "Do I really have to go?" "You and he are teamed together. Don't you remember telling everyone at dinner that father and son would bring home the prize game?" Dimitri winced. "It was my conscience speaking. AR those years in the laboratories while he grew up somehow behind my back." His wife smiled. "It will be good for you to get out in the air. Now finish your cigarette, eat your breakfast, and get dressed." "You know something?" said Yurievich, taking his wife's hand. "I'm just beginning to grasp it. This is a holiday. I can't remember our last one." "I'm not sure there ever was one. You work harder than any man I've ever known." Yurievich shrugged. "It was good of the army to grant our son leave." "He requested it. He wanted to be with you." "That was good of him, too. I love him, but I hardly know him." "He's a fine officer, everyone says. You can be proud." "Oh I am, indeed. It's just that I don't know what to say to him. We have so little in common. The vodka made things easier last night." "You haven't seen each other in nearly two years." "I've had my work, everyone knows that."~ "You're a scientist." His wife squeezed Dimitri's hand. "'But not today.
Not for the next three weeks! No labora. tories, no blackboards, no all-night sessions with eager young professors and students who want to tell everybody they've worked with the great Yurievich." She took the cigarette from between his lips and crushed it out. "Now, eat your breakfast and get dressed. A winter hunt will do you a world of good." "Mv dear woman," protested Dimitri, laughing, "it will probably be the death of me. I haven't fired a rifle in over twenty years!"
Lieutenant Nikolai Yurievich trudged through the deep snow toward the old building that was once the dacha's stables. He turned and looked back at the huge three-story main house. It glistened in the morning sunlight, a small alabaster palace set in an alabaster glen carved out of snow-laden forest.