violin case and her music binder, the bear in the backpack, the edge of her bandage peeking out of her hat, her face pale, her eyes as stubborn as ever. She was surprised to see Aspirin by the piano.
“What?”
“Hey,” Aspirin said.
“Hey. Did you get your visa?”
“Yup.”
“Congratulations,” Alyona said after a second and started taking off her coat.
“Alyona,” he giggled.
“What?” She stopped in the doorway.
“Could I be your brother?”
“You could. Just like anyone else.” She answered immediately, without a hint of surprise. “I have thought about it.”
“So maybe it is me. And you and I will go into the sunset, holding hands?”
“I doubt it.” Alyona hung her binder on the door handle. “When is your flight?”
“Tomorrow. Wait, did you say ‘I could be’? And now I can’t?”
“You can’t. I’ve analyzed a few things,” Alyona spoke drily, very much like an adult, “and I realized that no, it is not you.”
“Why, because I don’t look like a fallen angel?”
“Not in the least.” Alyona put on her slippers. “But I told you many times that my brother is not a fallen angel.”
“That’s a shame,” Aspirin said.
Alyona sat down on the sofa and looked at him expectantly. With a heavy sigh, Aspirin got up and went into the kitchen.
The day, already quite short, was lost in the gray fog. There was no promise of snow: rain kept tumbling down in long gray ribbons. A streetlight switched on, making raindrops sparkle on their way down through its halo of diffused glow.
Aspirin looked down.
A woman in an athletic jacket with a hood pulled down low ran by the streetlight, her sneakers cutting through the puddles. Keeping her pace, she followed the road around the corner of the building, where he could no longer see her.
He remembered Alyona saying “Evenings are especially hard for her.” But it was still daytime, around four in the afternoon, no later than that. He could hear the sounds of a firm, steady, particularly harsh, mechanical-sounding musical scale from the living room.
“This is enough for about three months,” Alyona said after carefully counting the money.
“If you try hard enough.” Aspirin was unpleasantly surprised. “You could blow it in one day. Right?”
“And what about paying bills?” Alyona stacked up the money. “The apartment fee, the phone bill, the electricity bill . . . Of course, I could always buy candles, but the refrigerator requires energy, doesn’t it?”
“You are so practical,” Aspirin mumbled. “How do you do this? If you came from another world, your head should be in the clouds!”
Alyona looked at him. Aspirin knew that smirk of hers quite well, that unpleasant, grown-up, full-of-bile grimace.
“I don’t have any more cash on me,” he said, restraining himself. “I will send it to you later.”
“And I suppose I should use my birth certificate to receive it, shouldn’t I.”
“Then don’t pay the apartment fee!” Aspirin exploded. “And let them turn off the phone—you don’t need it anyway.”
“So I shouldn’t expect daily calls?”
He walked off, exasperated.
It was just after eight o’clock. The neighbors’ water pipes hummed noisily. Irina was doing laps around the building, her wet hood pushed down low on her face. She took breaks, then came back out and ran another couple of laps. Aspirin was amazed by her tenacity; he’d drop after four laps (and that is if he was being generous).
A pair of new socks, still in their packaging, lay on the bottom of a small suitcase. Aspirin shuffled around the apartment, moving clothes from place to place, losing things he needed, finding them, then immediately losing them again. Alyona played her scales: for the fifth hour in a row, she made them sound harsh, then soft, then smooth, then violent. The extraordinary force that lived in that flimsy-looking girl terrified Aspirin, and yet it fascinated him more and more.
The phone rang. Aspirin flinched.
“Alyona! Get the phone! Tell them I am not here, I am away on business.”
The scale stopped.
“Hello. Good evening. No, he’s not here, he’s away on business. I don’t know. I don’t know. May I take a message? I will. Good-bye.”
“Who was that?” Aspirin said, taking a deep breath.
“Zhenya.” Alyona picked up her violin.
His cell phone chirped. Aspirin found the phone in his pocket, glanced at Zhenya’s number and declined the call.
“If you don’t want to talk to anyone, please turn off your phone,” Alyona said. “It’s distracting.”
Just as Aspirin pulled out his phone again to comply, another call came in on the landline. He felt like an unlucky soldier on a minefield.