next sunny day and served by Viktor Ipalyevich in person?”
Refusing to engage in a rhetorical battle with her father, Anna turned off the gas flame that kept the mechanism in operation. He said, “That’s the way to turn Four-Star Tsazukhin into rotgut,” and went into the living room, shaking his head. The velvet curtain that hid the sleeping alcove moved and a small hand appeared, followed by a child’s face—the image of Anna when she was a young girl. The child’s hair covered his ears and was cut straight across his forehead, just above his eyebrows. Long lashes screened his light eyes; he had a strong nose, and his mouth was a little too big.
“Are you finished now, Grandfather?” the boy asked.
Anna stepped into the living room. While the poet was announcing that the game could begin, he answered her anxious look with a nod. She formed the word temperature with her lips; her father pointed a finger upward and answered inaudibly, “Ninety-nine point seven.”
“You can play only until dinner,” Anna told her son by way of greeting.
Petya clambered out of the bed where they both slept and embraced his mother. In his dark blue pajamas, he resembled a miniature sailor. He jumped up onto the chair, squatted down, and moved a white pawn two squares forward. Anna carried her shopping bag into the kitchen, took out two cans, placed one between the windows, and opened the other. In order to prepare the soup, she had to move Viktor Ipalyevich’s private distillery to one side.
“I have to go out later,” she called into the living room. “Will you put Petya to bed?”
“You’re going to the combine again?” Anna’s father asked absently. “I wish I knew why you have to attend every meeting.”
“To get a Category One.” She dumped the red beets into the pot.
“And what’s the difference between a Category One painter and the rest of them?”
Anna looked at her hands, at her gray, chapped skin, at the cracks around her wrists. “A Category One painter doesn’t have to put her hands in lime anymore.”
The soup began to boil. She stirred it, remembering that the meeting of the building combine wasn’t scheduled to take place until the following week. The thought of her real purpose made her feel languid. She could heard her boy wheezing in the next room; the game excited him.
Shortly before seven o’clock, Anna left the apartment. The collar of her overcoat was turned up, and her fur hat was pulled down on her forehead. No one could have maintained that the cold wasn’t the reason for these precautions. On the ground floor, old Avdotya, a fellow resident, was fiddling with the mailbox. “Anna Tsazukhina, I’m at my wits’ end!” she cried out. Avdotya was nearly deaf. Since everyone spoke loudly to her, she took that for normal procedure and bawled at everyone in her turn.
“Have you misplaced your key again, Avdotya?”
“Indeed not! There it is!” The old woman looked up imploringly.
Anna considered the little metal drawers. Rust had made some of their numbers unrecognizable. “Isn’t yours seven-oh-six?”
“Seven hundred and six, exactly!” Avdotya pointed to her key ring, which was hanging awry from one of the little doors.
“But you’re trying to get into seven-eight-six.” Anna stuck the key into the right hole and turned the lock. The mail drawer was empty.
“I’m waiting for a letter from Metsentsev!” Avdotya explained, without looking into the mailbox. “He’s going to write me about …”
But Anna had stepped out of the building, and the closing door swallowed Avdotya’s last words. Anna left her street behind, turned into Mozhaisk Chaussée, and crossed to the side where the streetlights were no longer functioning. In such cold weather, fewer people than usual were out and about, but Anna kept her eyes open for someone standing still where there was nothing to see, someone who slowed his pace in the icy wind. Only when she was certain that everything on the avenue looked normal did she slip into an alleyway on her left, a narrow passage that was closed to traffic. And yet Anna knew that at the end of the alley, for the past several minutes, a black automobile had been waiting with its engine running; the driver didn’t want to get cold while he waited. She hadn’t taken more than a few steps on the hard-trodden snow before the car’s headlights flared and a rear door opened.
“Good evening, Anton,” she said, settling into the backseat.