her eyes closed so that she wouldn’t see the chaos she’d spent the night in. Viktor Ipalyevich lay on the sofa, half dead from liquor and exhaustion; toward the end, he’d unbuttoned his shirt to the navel and done a dance, all the while shamelessly courting the chubby Akhmadulina. When Leonid arrived, the litterateurs who were still at the party hardly noticed. Eventually, when she was more than ready for them to leave, Anna had employed the only effective stratagem: She’d hidden the vodka and pretended that the last bottle had been drained. This drastic move had been followed by excessively drawn-out leave-taking, but gradually the last hats and coats disappeared and the sounds died out, until only Anna, her intoxicated father, and Leonid were left. He would have liked to see Petya there and then, but Anna hadn’t wanted to disturb her neighbors again, especially not at that hour.
Her state of mind—her strong sense of relief—surprised Anna. She wasn’t alone in the world. Her man had come home, her husband, Petya’s father. Before his transfer, she’d often felt as though he were a stranger; the smells he’d brought home from the barracks were strange, as was the way the army barbers cut his hair. Leonid’s laughter had sounded strange to her, to say nothing of the military jargon, the man-speak so ill suited to his personality. This strangeness might sooner or later have led to a breakup, but they hadn’t broken up; instead, Leonid had gone far away. Since then, Anna thought, it had been left to her and her alone to cope with everything that needed coping with: her difficult father, Petya and his health problems, her morbid love affair, the furtiveness, the lies. All at once, however, on this unreal morning, her husband was lying beside her. Wouldn’t it be only natural to find that strange, too, after so long? Leonid’s limbs were heavy; when he rolled over, he nearly crushed her. Next to his, her legs looked as spindly as a child’s. While she gazed upon him, registering everything, feeling his breath, touching the hair on his chest, Anna suddenly, physically realized how alone she’d been. She formed no illusions about the rekindling of love, but she felt the liberation of letting go, if only for a few days, of what she usually clutched with such an iron grip. Leonid was there, he’d take care of things, she could leave the decisions to him.
So there were many reasons why Anna didn’t want to begin her day by cleaning up after Viktor Ipalyevich’s party. It would take hours to make everything tidy again—but not today. Today, she’d let the apartment keep looking like a pigsty, let her father get the tomato sauce off the radiators and bring the glasses to the cellar and the tablecloths to the laundry room. Anna wanted an entirely happy day, a genuine Sunday. And after that, who knew, maybe the happiness would last; maybe their separation would even turn out to have been useful, and out of it a new togetherness might bloom.
She carefully detached herself from her sleeping companion, put her feet on the floor, and reached for her housecoat. First she’d go and fetch Petya, and then he could awaken his grandfather. Without risking a glance at the mirror, she walked swiftly to the foyer, ran her fingers through her hair, and took the key. Sunday silence reigned in the stairwell.
If it hadn’t been for Petya, Leonid would have spoken before the night was through. But because of the boy, he wanted to be cautious, so he resolved to probe a little first, to find out how things stood. And since he was dead tired after his twenty-six-hour flight, Leonid had fallen asleep shortly after arriving home, but not so quickly as Anna. Her hair had tickled his nose, her body had seemed bulkier, and in his memory, her skin had not been so winter-white. They’d slept together every night for two years in that narrow alcove, but this time, anxiety made it hard for him to breathe. He’d always loved her “poetic” neck; on this morning, he couldn’t find anything lovable about it. When he considered how little thought he gave to Anna’s future, he had to admit that his lack of concern for her was strange in itself. His idea of Anna was that she could take care of herself, as she always had done, even when he’d been there; she’d never needed his help. And in the