Дэвид Салой: The Innocent

‘I understand.’

‘I might be able to find a room for him. Somewhere.’

‘If it’s possible …’

‘We’re very full at the moment.’

Agata has not been listening. Suddenly something in her seems to snap. As if in slow motion, she sinks to the red linoleum, sobbing violently. Her legs slide out in perpendicular directions. She starts to wail.

THE NEXT MORNING, Aleksandr finds her her normal self. Everything seems more normal, though it is the first time that he has seen her without make-up, and she looks older. Older than she is, in fact. Of course, she is exhausted. Her face is very pale, except for the semicircles under her eyes. She has almost no eyebrows, he notices; the way her hair is scraped back emphasises this. They are standing in the hallway, outside the small ward where space was found for Ivan. There is a window, slightly steamed up, with some pot plants on the sill.

She tells him matter-of-factly how she and Ivan were preparing to leave for a dinner party. Ivan was tying his tie and inspecting himself in the mirror when he started to sweat profusely. ‘He was panting like a dog,’ she says. He said he felt sick, and strange, and that he did not think he would be able to go to the party. He seemed very worried. And then suddenly he was in terrible pain. That was when she phoned for the ambulance. Everything happened so fast. She says that even then she thought how lucky it was that Natalya, their four-year-old daughter, was not there. She was with Agata’s parents for the evening.

While she waited for the ambulance, sitting tearfully on the floor in the hall next to her struggling husband – ‘he was struggling like a fish out of water, exactly like that’ – she phoned Andrey. The ambulance men, when they finally arrived, would not take her with them, so she had to wait for Andrei to drive her to the hospital. They went first to the Fourth Department hospital, but Ivan was not there, so they went to the hospital on Vilonov Street. ‘I thought he would be dead by the time we got there,’ she says.

Some yellow leaves still cling to the birches behind the hospital – yellow in the otherwise grey space of the hospital garden, where they are walking slowly on a cement path. ‘The doctor says his heart might be damaged. And there’s a chance he’ll have another attack. Especially in the next few days. They say he can’t have any physical or psychological stress. He can’t have any visitors for now. I’m sorry you can’t see him, Aleksandr Andreyevich.’

‘I understand.’

‘And he needs to stop smoking,’ she says.

He holds open the door for her and they step inside, into the humid interior of the hospital. She has been there all night, is still wearing the same sparkly evening wear. The sequined jacket is on her shoulders like a shawl.

‘I slept for a few hours,’ she says, in the lift, when he asks her. ‘On a sofa downstairs.’

‘You should go home and sleep properly.’

‘Andryusha will be here later. I’ll go then.’

‘Okay.’

Looking at her now, in the neon light of the lift, he feels that he has misjudged her in the past. In particular, he had not noticed, until now, how much she loves Ivan. He has never taken her, or their marriage, entirely seriously. She is his fourth wife, and was his secretary first, and is twenty years younger than he is. Aleksandr had always felt that she somehow tricked Ivan – foolish, sensuous, soft-hearted Ivan – into marrying her. Now it strikes him for the first time how much she puts up with. Ivan himself sometimes seems not to take her, or their marriage, entirely seriously. He is patronising to her, offhand, impatient, offensive – often in front of other people, in ways that seem intended to hurt and humiliate her.

‘Andryusha says he’s sorry,’ she says.

‘Sorry for what?’

‘For what he said last night.’

‘What did he say?’

‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me. He said he said something to you.’

‘Did he?’

‘Yes.’

He shakes his head – pretends not to know what she means. However, he has been wondering ever since what his nephew meant when he said, What do you care ? It stung him, no question. He wonders in particular what Ivan might have said to his son to prompt a question like that; wonders what sort of things are said about him in Ivan’s family. It strikes him that if he had a family some fairly unpleasant things might sometimes be said, en famille , about Ivan.

‘Well,’ Agata says, ‘he says he’s sorry. He was upset.’

‘I know.’

‘Thank you for visiting, Aleksandr Andreyevich. I’m sorry you couldn’t see him.’ He is walking towards the lift when she says, ‘Oh, Aleksandr Andreyevich?’

‘Yes?’

‘Would you mind stopping by our place and feeding Lovkach? That would be very helpful. The poor thing hasn’t eaten since yesterday. I’d forgotten about him.’ She starts searching through her handbag for the keys. ‘Give him a tin of sardines – there’s plenty there – and some milk.’

‘Okay.’

‘Leave the keys with Stepan. The porter,’ she says.

‘Okay.’

‘Thank you.’

He waits for the tram on Mayakovsky Street. It is a sharp blue-skied September morning. This sort of autumn weather, these sort of mornings and their sad, still, quiet afternoons always make him think of the autumn of forty-eight, as if every autumn since then were only a memory of that one. The tram takes him to 1905 Square from where he walks the short distance to Ivan’s flat. He is passing through the lobby when a voice shouts, ‘Excuse me!’ It is the porter, Stepan presumably, in his ill-fitting uniform. ‘Who are you?’ he says.

Aleksandr explains.

‘Oh yes?’ Stepan is openly sceptical. ‘I don’t know you.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Well, they’re not in,’ he says.

‘I know. I’ve got the key.’

‘ Have you?’

‘My brother’s in hospital. I’m here to feed the cat.’

For a moment Stepan squints at him suspiciously. Then – perhaps noticing that, despite his somewhat threadbare coat and very old astrakhan hat, his shoes are polished, his fingernails scrubbed – he seems to decide that what he has said is a plausible enough explanation for his presence. Certainly it would be a strange thing for an impostor to say. ‘Eighth floor,’ he murmurs, and Aleksandr summons the lift. It hums down, and stops with a loud tick.

The upstairs hall is silent. He lets himself into Ivan’s flat. Lovkach – white, fluffy – is immediately there, miaowing loudly and showing his milky needle-teeth. He flicks his tail and trots up and down the parquet, shoving himself against the legs of the furniture. The hall is long and large, with the living room on the left. Part of the dividing wall is made of smoked glass and some shadowy daylight seeps through. Aleksandr shuts the front door and, with the usual slightly intrusive feeling of entering someone else’s home when they are not there, followed by Lovkach, makes his way into the kitchen.

It is spotless and full of strange electric machines. The fridge is like a white sarcophagus. He takes out a plastic sack of milk and looks for a knife or scissors to open it with. There is a wooden block with several slots in it, in which knives of various sizes are inserted. He takes one of the smaller ones and saws at the plastic until it suddenly splits. Quite a lot of milk spills onto the floor, and Lovkach starts to lick it up. Swearing quietly, Aleksandr fits the sack of milk into its special plastic holder and looks for something to pour some into. Then, while Lovkach laps noisily, he finds and opens a tin of sardines. He puts it on the floor next to what is left of the milk, and washes the oil from his hands.