The Russian Affair - By Michael Wallner Page 0,120
” Petya went on. “ ‘My wastepaper basket is filled with failed attempts. I’ve never found anything so difficult.’ He’s not saying anything to me!” Petya scooted away from his mother. “What does that mean, ‘failed attempts’?”
“That’s when you first try to do something, before you know how it goes,” she answered randomly. Her mind was focused on the reason behind Leonid’s introduction. She paled at the thought that he was writing to tell her he’d signed the five-year stipulation. How could he have chosen this way to announce a decision about something so important? Why hadn’t he telephoned her?
“You know what?” Anna announced, suddenly uneasy. “Let’s do it the way Papa says.” She opened the curtain. “I’ll go into the kitchen and read the letter by myself, and after that we’ll read it again together.”
“But I want to read it now! I want to read it now!” Petya couldn’t manage to disentangle himself from the blanket in time, and Anna was able to jump out of the bed. Ignoring her father’s alert gaze, she hurried past him. “Is the gas on, at least?” she asked, drawing the kitchen curtain between herself and the others.
“We made tea.”
Anna heard the quick, small steps as Petya ran across the living room, heard them stop suddenly as her father caught his grandson and tried with soothing words to prevent him from following her.
“But it’s from Papa!” This protest was followed by a skirmish that ended only when Viktor Ipalyevich proposed an extraordinary, pre-dinner game of chess. Anna bent over the letter.
“… I’ve never found anything so difficult,” she read again, in her husband’s forceful handwriting. “Let me simply describe what happened, and then you’ll understand.”
As Anna read on, she pulled up the chair and even had the presence of mind to light the gas with a match. She decided not to put the teakettle on to boil. When she was finished with each page, she laid it atop a neat stack, stopped once to decipher the word inexplicable, read the last lines and the greetings to Petya, and pushed the stack away. She leaned back and looked at her actual surroundings—the spice rack, the coating of grease on the heating pipe, the flecks of tomato sauce here and there. Looking out the window, she saw the swaying branches below her, the green that signaled the return of warm weather—in contrast to her cold apartment.
With one spring she was in front of the curtain; with two more steps, she reached her shoes and slipped into them. “I have to go back down … I forgot …” Without ending the sentence, she stepped out the door. On the second floor, she remembered that she’d left the gas burner on; her father would notice it before long, she thought. Bounding as though for joy, she dashed across the entrance hall and out into the street.
Spring had taken hold of the city and was tightening its grip a little more every day, making evenings like this one bright and warm. Despite the lateness of the hour, the sun was still sending out a few rays, the sky remained deep blue; it was the time of year everyone had been waiting five months for. Anna removed her felt jacket and slung it over her shoulder; in her flat shoes, she could walk fast. She crossed the Chaussée against the red light, got honked at, and a minute later reached the park. Even though the big trees hadn’t yet leafed out fully, green had already won the ground battle, the forsythias were blooming, and there were primroses on the park lawns. Anna couldn’t stand still; if she wanted to let the news she’d just read sink in all the way, remaining in constant motion was her only option. Leonid had gone on at great length and filled many pages to avoid the truth, but in the end he’d come out with it. The effect was powerful and simple at once. An emergency solution meant to take him away from Moscow temporarily had turned into Leonid’s new future, a situation he desired, a complete change of direction. Oddly enough, Anna’s first concern was the application for the apartment in Nostikhyeva, which she would now have to withdraw, because apartments of that size weren’t granted to single mothers. At the end of his letter, Leonid, too, had mentioned a practical consideration: how to arrange for a seven-year-old to make the journey to Siberia alone. Leonid ruled out the possibility of his