“You’ve got enough time,” Rosa said, and when Anna hesitated, she added, “Don’t worry about your clothes—you don’t need to dress up for this place.” She named an address, and Anna rang off.
Petya left the radiation room happy, declaring that he was warm all over. On the way back, he stopped several times to talk about the magic light he’d been shot with; the light, he said, had made the nurse’s white coat shine blue.
When she saw the line in front of the pharmacy, Anna lost patience. With a tight grip on Petya’s hand, she pulled him past the waiting customers to the entrance. “It’s an emergency,” she said to the protesting women and gave the gaunt pharmacist an imploring look. If he wished to, he could banish her to the end of the line.
“What does he need?”
Ignoring the murmurs of disapproval around her, Anna took out the prescription.
After a scant look at it, the pharmacist said, “We don’t have that. I can give you something similar.” He turned to the storage drawer cabinet behind him. “But it’ll cost more.”
“The doctor said …” Anna tapped the prescription.
“Yes or no?” With a jerk, he pulled out a drawer.
“I’ll take it.” She removed from Petya’s grasp the plastic sign advising customers that they could have only one prescription filled per day.
The substitute medicine was three times as expensive as the one originally prescribed, but the growing ill humor of the people waiting in line induced Anna to pay without further delay. Taking her boy by the hand, she stepped out into the cold.
When they got home, the apartment had been tidied up and Viktor Ipalyevich, dressed in the jacket he wore around the house, was sitting at the table. His composition book lay in front of him, and next to it, a writing pad with notes. The glass beside him was empty. Anna laid her hand on the samovar; whatever Viktor Ipalyevich had been drinking, it wasn’t tea. His cap was pulled down to his eyes, as if he wanted to shut out the visible world. His pencil hung motionless over the paper.
“Would you like beef in pepper sauce for lunch?” Anna asked as she passed him on her way to the kitchen. She’d put the fatty meat in a marinade the night before and needed only to cook it. Petya took his book from the sofa, pulled the curtain to one side, and threw himself onto the bed.
“I swapped shifts with Svetlana today. Will you fix Petya’s dinner?”
The figure in the black woolen jacket didn’t move. While sautéing the garlic, Anna read the little leaflet that had come with Petya’s medicine, set some water on to boil, and prepared his inhalant. She squeezed tomato paste out of a tube, stirred it into the pot, and added the meat. Then she went into the other room and sat down across from her father. He didn’t look up. There was writing on the page in front of him, but an eraser lay close at hand. In order to save paper, Viktor Ipalyevich would make repeated revisions of a poem on the same sheet, until it was gray and worn from erasures. Anna started telling him about her morning at the clinic, heard the water boiling, rushed to the kitchen to fetch it, stirred the meat as she passed, and carried the steaming pot into the room. She called Petya, who laid his book aside, grumbling a bit, and trotted over to the table. She poured the required amount of the inhalant into the water, put a cushion under the boy, told him to lean over the pot, and spread a towel over his head and shoulders. He gasped for air and started struggling; his mother stroked his back. If he was a brave boy, she told him, he’d start feeling better that very day. Gradually, the little fellow under the towel began to breathe evenly.
“How’s it coming along?” Anna asked her father.
“Nothing’s coming anymore. I’ve been aware of it for a long time.” He looked at her with watery eyes; his homemade liquor was having its effect. “The spring has dried up.”
“But you were writing well just yesterday.”
“One can always write something.” He turned over the page and showed his daughter that he had torn out all the preceding pages. “Worthless stuff. I sit there from morning till evening and tell myself I’m practicing a craft.” He threw his pencil across the table. “An idler, that’s what I’ve become.