him. I told them, and they said they understood. They didn’t believe me, so I made sure they’d listen. Then they didn’t come back.’
‘When was this?’
She waved a dismissive hand. ‘Oh, years …’ She paused. ‘Then he stopped walking past, and there was just me. I preferred it when he was there.’ She raised her head towards the ceiling. Her irises disappeared under her eyelids and Mihail could see only the blank whiteness of her eyeballs staring at him. Then her head dropped and she looked at him more normally. ‘You think I’m mad, don’t you?’
‘I think …’ Mihail had no answer. If she was mad she had been driven mad. Her husband was undead – it was quite conceivable that she had seen him, but what was she supposed to make of it?
‘I wish I were,’ she moaned. ‘When I was mad, I believed it when I saw him. Now I’m sane, I know he’s not real, even when I do see him.’
It was an unfathomable contradiction, but she was bound by no law that insisted she should make sense.
‘You still see him?’ asked Mihail eagerly.
‘Don’t tease me. I know he’s not real.’
She pushed down hard on the arms of her chair and rose unsteadily to her feet. Mihail noticed a faint peeling sound as the fabric of the dress separated from that of the chair, as if she had not moved for a very long time. She walked, taking the smallest of steps, over to a high table, or perhaps a dresser, in the corner of the room; it was impossible to clearly discern its shape. A sheet had been thrown over it, now thick with the ubiquitous stratum of dust, and it was covered with rags and junk. The journey took half a minute, during which neither of them said a word. She was purposeful in her motion and Mihail did not want to distract her.
When she reached the table she lifted the sheet and reached beneath it, her fingers stretched. A sound emerged and Mihail realized he had been mistaken. It was neither a table nor a dresser, but a piano – unrecognizable among the furniture and rubbish that had been piled around it and on it. The tune she played was mournful, made even more deathly by the instrument’s untuned strings. It was Chopin’s Marche Funèbre, though Svetlana was playing only the melody. Even so, she managed to invest the short, repeated phrase with far more melancholy than Mihail had ever heard in it before.
‘He loved Chopin above anyone,’ she said. ‘Even me, I think. I wonder if he still plays.’
‘Where do you see him?’ asked Mihail.
Svetlana raised her hand from the piano and the tune stopped. She turned and made the same slow, steady progress as before; this time towards the window. Mihail walked over to join her, arriving long before she did. The foetid smell was stronger when she stood beside him.
‘He walks along the embankment, just here,’ she said, pointing to the street below. ‘You’d think he’d look up, just for old times’ sake, but he never does.’
‘Where does he go?’
‘He crosses by the Egyptian Bridge, but then I lose sight of him.’
‘This is in the evenings?’
‘Of course,’ she said, with a casual certainty that made Mihail suspicious. To him the fact it was evening made perfect sense, but there was no reason it should for her. Did she guess?
‘And does he come back?’ Mihail asked.
‘I wait up until I see him safely return. He usually does, but not always.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘He stopped for a while, but then he started again.’
‘Recently?’
She began to nod, but then her head came to a standstill. She turned to him and gave a puzzled frown. ‘Pardon?’
‘When did you last see him?’ asked Mihail.
‘Who?’
‘Dmitry Alekseevich – your husband.’
‘My husband’s dead,’ she said and turned away. She resumed her slow shuffle back towards her chair. When she reached it she turned and sat down, emitting a small, contented sigh. Then she looked up, as if catching sight of Mihail for the first time.
‘You have news?’ she asked. ‘From Sevastopol?’
Mihail left without another word.
Blood – that was what he craved. Not milk. Blood. And she gave it to him. He could not understand why, nor did he care. He needed blood and Susanna provided it. She had wept when she saw him and he had tasted the salt of her tears on his dry lips. He’d still been unable to recall the word, even to mouth