Suddenly, she heard a woman’s voice: “My sweetheart, you poor little thing, you must be all worn out, and so tired, so sad. Come on up.”
Pushkin’s bronze trouser legs concealed the speaker. Anna leaned over, propping herself on her elbows, and saw a heavily dressed woman with a knitted scarf on her head. She was bending forward and helping someone to climb up beside her. Anna thought she might be a grandmother on an outing with her grandson, but in the next moment a mongrel dog leaped into sight, his hind legs slipping helplessly on the smooth stone.
“That’s too high for you, all stiff and frozen as you are.” The woman grasped the dog’s chest with both hands and pulled him up. “I’m helping you, look, I’m helping you, my little friend.” Befuddled by his new vantage point, so high above the ground, the dog shook himself and looked at the old woman. She stroked his head between his shaggy ears, opened her cloth bag, and took out some food scraps. Anna watched as the woman, chattering nonstop, fed the dog bread and cold potatoes.
“You’ve found yourself a good spot, at the feet of the great philanthropist. Nobody wants to act heartless here. You’ll find compassion here, little one, yes, that tastes good, doesn’t it?” As the old woman took another potato out of her bag, she noticed that she was being observed. “My Tasha died,” she went on, as if she’d included Anna in the conversation right from the start. “A female poodle, she was. I made lots of pretty things for her—I didn’t want my Tasha to be cold, ever. All the same, she often got sick, her eyes never stopped running. She died from something else, though.” The dog gave the woman a nudge, because she’d forgotten to keep feeding him. “I don’t have any more,” she said, patting him hard on the head. “Tomorrow there’ll be a little canned fish. Are you coming again tomorrow, my little friend? Well, I am, too, so we have a date, right?”
“Does he have a name?”
“We’re seeing each other for the first time today.” The old woman snapped her bag shut. “And he surely won’t be here tomorrow.” She looked at the dog reproachfully. “Street mutts are faithless.” She scooted clumsily to the edge of the pedestal. “The dogcatcher may pick him up before morning. Right, sweetheart? If you don’t watch out, you’ll wind up in some research lab where they’ll operate on you and stick tubes in you.” The dog wagged his tail attentively. “At least you’ve had enough to eat this one time.” She jumped down from the pedestal, pulled her bag after her, and disappeared into the foggy darkness. The mongrel didn’t follow her; he laid his head between his paws and had a digestive nap.
The statue loomed blackly above Anna. It was high time for her to leave. She thrust her hands into her sleeves and tried to count the lighted windows in the apartment building across from her; like a trellis of light, they rose up out of the darkness and cast shadowy reflections on the frozen river.
Anna didn’t want to deceive Alexey; the shamefulness of it festered in her like an ulcer. A solution would require but a single step: She would have to leave him. For doing that, she could have named a hundred reasons, among them the truth. In the beginning, she’d believed that time was on her side; everything had seemed amusing and easy at first. Anna tilted her head back.
She hadn’t fallen in love with Alexey, she didn’t lust after him, and yet the evenings she spent with him felt to her like excursions to an exotic island. Once a week, usually Thursday, she was picked up by Anton and brought to the Drezhnevskaya apartment. It was as if Anna were going out to a play in which she had the main role. They would always start by chatting about everyday things over a drink or two; eventually, Anna would go into the bathroom, undress, and return naked to the living room, where Alexey would already be stretched out on the sofa. He’d tell her of his travels, and thus she heard about remote regions of the Soviet Union, about people whose way of life differed utterly from that of the Muscovites. Once Bulyagkov evoked a happy memory, an incident from his childhood in rural Ukraine, and his tale made Anna think of one of her father’s poems.