raised on an uninhabited island and never seen a woman before.

She beamed at me.

'You're Romka's dad, are you?'

'What?' I asked, confused.

The woman was slightly embarrassed.

'I'm sorry. The other day a little boy got lost in the forest, I showed him the way back to the village. He stammered too . . . a little bit. So I thought . . .'

'I don't usually stammer,' I mumbled. 'I'm usually always spouting all sorts of nonsense. But I wasn't expecting to meet such a beautiful woman in the forest, and I just choked up.'

The 'beautiful woman' laughed:

'Oh, and are those words nonsense too? Or the truth?'

'The truth,' I confessed.

'Won't you come in?' She stepped back into the house. 'And thank you very much. Round here compliments are hard to come by . . .'

'Well, you won't meet people here very often,' I observed, walking into the house and looking around.

Not a trace of magic. A rather strange interior for a house in a forest, but then you come across all sorts of things. True, there was a bookcase with old volumes in it . . . But there were no indications that my hostess was an Other.

'There are two villages near here,' the woman explained. 'The one I took the children back to and another, a bit larger. I go there to buy groceries, the shop's always open. But it's still not a good place for compliments.'

She smiled again.

'My name's Arina. Not Irina – Arina.'

'Anton,' I replied. And then I showed off my schoolboy literary erudition. 'Arina, like Pushkin's nanny?'

'Precisely, I was named after her,' the woman said, still smiling. 'My father was Alexander Sergeevich, like Pushkin, and naturally my mother was crazy about the poet. You could say she was a fanatic. So that's where I got my name . . .'

'But why not Anna, after Anna Kern? Or Natalya, after Natalya Goncharova?'

Arina shook her head.

'Oh, that wouldn't do . . . My mother believed all those women played a disastrous role in Pushkin's life. Yes, they served as a source of inspiration, but he suffered greatly as a man . . . But the nanny . . . she made no claims on her Sasha, she loved him devotedly.'

'Are you a literary specialist?' I asked, putting out a feeler.

'What would a literary specialist be doing here?' Arina laughed. 'Have a seat, I'll make some tea, it's really good, with herbs. Everyone's gone crazy just recently about maté and rooibosch and those other foreign teas. But we Russians don't need all those exotic brews. We have enough herbs of our own. Or just ordinary black tea – we're not Chinese, why should we drink green water? Or forest herbs. Here, try this . . .'

'You're a botanist,' I said dejectedly.

'Correct!' Arina laughed. 'Are you sure you're not Romka's dad?'

'No, I'm . . .' I hesitated for a moment, and then said the most convenient thing that came to mind, 'I'm a friend of his mother's. Thank you very much for saving the children.'

'Oh, sure, I really saved them!' Arina said and smiled again. She was standing with her back to me, sprinkling dry herbs into a teapot – a pinch of one, a tiny bit of another, a spoonful of a third . . . my gaze automatically came to rest on the section of those worn jeans that outlined her firm backside. And somehow it was immediately clear that it was taut, without any sign of that favourite city lady's ailment, cellulite. 'Ksyusha's a bright girl, they'd have found their own way out.'

'What about the wolves?' I asked.

'What wolves, Anton?' Arina looked at me in amazement. 'I explained that to them – it was a stray dog. Where would wolves come from in a small forest like this?'

'A stray dog with puppies is dangerous too,' I observed.

'Well, maybe you're right.' Arina sighed. 'But even so, I don't think it would have attacked the children; an animal has to go completely mad to do something like that. People are far more dangerous than animals.'

I couldn't argue with that.

'Don't you find it boring out here in the wilderness?' I asked, changing the subject.

'I'm not stuck here all the time,' Arina laughed. 'I come for the summer, I'm writing a dissertation: "The ethnogenesis of certain species of crucifers in the central region of Russia".'

'For a doctorate?' I asked, feeling rather envious. I was still disappointed that I'd never finished writing mine, because I'd become an Other, and all those scholarly games had suddenly