it had been a long time since he’d felt so comfortable. The fog outside, the noiseless night, the woman busy at the stove—he got up and went to her, hugged her from behind, and clasped her breasts. She stood still for a moment before returning to her culinary activities. A little later, the barley soup was on the table. Galina put a spoonful of sour cream on each portion.
She stood beside his chair. “Well? That was all?”
He pulled her down on his lap, the spoon fell to the floor, sour cream spattered the floorboards. Galina kissed more wildly, more playfully than Anna; her mouth seemed to be everywhere at once. Her pelvis never stopped moving the whole time she was sitting on him, so he lifted her up and tried to carry her into the next room. But Galina insisted that they eat first; she wanted him to appreciate her soup.
“Take that off,” she said, pointing to his wedding ring.
Their embrace was wonderful, weightless; their bodies intertwined in total intimacy and remained entangled long after they collapsed and lay panting. He’d often wished that something of the sort would happen with Anna, but it had seemed an empty fantasy, and he’d told himself that he wasn’t capable of transporting a woman to such a height of passion. With Galina, everything had happened effortlessly. He couldn’t stop caressing her; he’d had to travel five thousand miles from home in order to meet someone like this. Everything felt warm to him; it was as if he’d seen the pattern in this carpet or his toes at the end of this bed a hundred times before; even the way to the toilet seemed familiar. When Galina fell asleep in his arms and her breathing grew regular, he gave no consideration whatever to leaving and thought only briefly about the excuse he’d offer for having missed the morning roll call. Then, gently, he woke Galina up, and they made love again. When the inexorable brightness of dawn appeared, she pulled the thick curtains closed and announced with a sigh that now she must sleep for a few hours. Leonid got up. As he put on his uniform, he found every movement difficult, and the prospect of saying good-bye to her seemed impossibly daunting.
“Today’s my birthday,” he said suddenly, speaking into the chilled air of the apartment.
“Then you were born under the sign of the fishes,” Galina murmured, already half asleep. “I’m a scorpion.”
He pulled on his second boot, kissed her thick, naked foot, and left. He had breakfast in the city, followed by a shot of liquor for his birthday. Then he went back to the base. A long letter from Anna had come for him; in it, she told him how much she wished they could be together on that day. She’d enclosed a drawing, made by Petya, which depicted an oversized soldier on a tiny island. Only when Leonid washed his hands that evening did he notice that he’d left his wedding ring at Galina’s. He knew the date when she was leaving, he was aware that he had only a few days to get the ring back, and yet he let the time pass.
Leonid spent the melancholy day of Galina’s departure in his office on the edge of the cliff. As the hours passed, he came to the realization that his betrayal of Anna’s trust meant nothing to him. He almost wished that Galina would take the ring with her to Yakutia.
One week later, a small package came to Leonid in the military mail. He assumed it was from Anna, but the return address was the hospital in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. He knew what the contents would be. One does not forget such a thing, Comrade! These words were written in a vigorous hand on the sheet of paper the ring was wrapped in. At the bottom of the page, easy to overlook, was an address: 119 Cosmonauts Street, Yakutsk. No salutation, no hopes to meet again; and yet, for Leonid, that address was the origin of a temptation that grew stronger and stronger with every day he spent on Sakhalin Island. Cosmonauts Street, number 119, was on the mainland, far away, yet it soon came to represent for him the focal point of his deepest longing; he would have preferred to die than never to see Cosmonauts Street. So when his turn to take home leave approached, it was only logical that he should put in for a week not in Moscow