“The winter made a real mess.” The neighbors kept eating.
Anna went down on her knees. Her grandparents’ marker had been moved farther back, and in the middle stood a stone of polished granite bearing a picture of her mother. The photograph showed a pretty woman with her hair pinned up high on her head. The look on the youthful face gave Anna a pang; in reality, Dora Tsazukhina had been a slight, inconspicuous woman, somewhat shorter than Viktor Ipalyevich. She’d worked for the Writers’ Association as one of a hundred typists and had met, at a reception, the poet whose work she’d revered even as a girl. Viktor Ipalyevich was divorced, and he enjoyed being revered by women for his poetry. He’d seduced Dora that very night and visited her a few times after that at the Writers’ Association, but without considering the matter very important. Soon afterward, a lover of many years’ standing left him for a sculptor who won the Lenin Prize. Finding himself empty-handed in every way had dealt a sharp blow to Viktor Ipalyevich’s self-confidence. As chance would have it, the editing of his latest volume of poems had recently been completed, and Dora was typing up the revised manuscript, so that the two of them had professional reasons for spending time together. The poet had instinctively understood that in securing Dora he would be drawing to his side a lifelong admirer, someone who would always subordinate her existence to his needs and who (this consideration was not to be disdained) earned a respectable income. Dora and Viktor were married during a heavy March rainstorm; at the end of November, Anna came into the world. “She’ll be an idealist,” her father had declared, and he’d given her the name of the protagonist in Tolstoy’s famous novel. The allocation of a larger apartment was achieved without difficulty, and Viktor, Dora, and the infant moved into their new home near Filyovsky Park. Dora wasn’t robust, but nobody found her delicacy worrying; for Viktor Ipalyevich, all it meant was that he would go on his long hikes through the hills around Zagorsk alone or choose easier routes. On one such excursion, Dora had slipped and, although she didn’t fall, broken her shinbone. The fragility of her bone structure aroused surprise; a medical examination revealed that she had cancer of the bone marrow. At the time when her mother was hospitalized, Anna was a fourteen-year-old Pioneer Girl. For three years, Dora had fought her illness with a determination that commanded Viktor Ipalyevich’s deepest respect; in the final months, however, both he and his daughter had wished that the sick woman’s ordeal might be over soon. Anna’s mother died in the household; outside, as on her wedding day, there was a terrific downpour. The normally complacent Viktor Ipalyevich had mourned his wife’s death more deeply than Anna would have thought him capable of doing, and during this period he’d produced his most beautiful poems: not elegies, but vibrant declarations of love to Dora. Shortly afterward, Anna had left school and accepted a trainee position in the building combine.
Now she knelt at her mother’s grave. While casting hungry glances at her neighbors’ picnic, she’d dug little hollows in the soil and planted the forget-me-nots in a circle around the gravestone. Then she’d swept all the blackened leaves off the grave and polished its brass ornamentation, and as she was kneeling there quietly for a moment, a cloth pattern came into her field of vision—a summer dress that Anna recognized. It was the same woman she’d met during the cloudburst outside the bakery.
“Anna?” the woman asked warily, as if she weren’t sure of the name.
“Rosa!”
“What a coincidence!” the woman said, laughing. Her hair shimmered in the midday sun.
“Who do you have in here?” Anna asked, tamping down the earth around the forget-me-nots.
“My paternal grandparents.” Rosa pointed to the cemetery’s main avenue.
“My mother,” Anna said, pointing to the photograph.
“You look like her.”
“She died when I was seventeen.”
“I’m doubly happy to see you again,” Rosa said, extracting her wallet from her purse.
Anna remembered how embarrassed Rosa had been in the tearoom. She hadn’t had enough money, and she’d been unable to pay her share; Anna had even been obliged to lend her subway fare. “Forget it,” Anna said. “It was my treat.”
Rosa insisted on immediate reciprocation. She accompanied Anna as she poured stale water out of a vase, carried the vase over to a faucet, and filled the vessel with fresh water.