Ira switched off the engine but kept her hands on the steering wheel. Through the fogged-up windshield, she watched him standing outside the restaurant, holding another woman by the elbow.
Not by the waist. By the elbow.
That was how you held someone when helping them step over a puddle or when you didn’t want them to slip.
The woman threw back her head and laughed. Her hair was light, illuminated by the streetlamp, and Ira automatically noted that it wasn’t dyed. Or perhaps it was dyed very well. Hair like that didn’t come out of a salon looking that way. Hair like that simply grew that way.
He leaned toward her and whispered something in her ear. The woman nodded. They didn’t kiss. They simply stood beneath the awning until the coat-check attendant brought her coat. Then he opened the door of a taxi for her.
The woman got in and waved.
He remained on the sidewalk, slipping his hands into his pockets.
The taxi drove away.
Ira exhaled and pressed her forehead against the cold glass.
She hadn’t come here to spy on him. She had come to pick him up because Valera’s phone had died, while her mother, who had been in the hospital for two days, wasn’t answering her calls. Ira needed to decide whether they should drive there during the night or wait until morning.
She knew which restaurant he was at because of the text message he had sent four hours earlier:
“Dinner with business partners. I’ll be late.”
Business partners.
Right.
She leaned back against the seat. Her body suddenly felt light and hollow, like an empty cardboard shoebox. Somewhere inside her, however, there seemed to be a nail lodged deep.
Ira sat there counting the flashes of the hazard lights—seventeen, eighteen—until she realized he was walking toward his car.
His car.
She had left hers fifty meters away, around the corner.
He walked straight past her without looking around. He got into his car, started the engine, and drove away.
Ira watched the red taillights disappear and thought that she should probably start her own engine too.
But she didn’t.
Instead, she opened the door, stepped out into the drizzling rain, and inhaled so deeply that a sharp pain stabbed beneath her ribs.
Home greeted her with the smell of yesterday’s meat patties and the sound of the television.
He was already in the bedroom.
The door stood slightly open, a strip of light falling through the gap onto the hallway floor. Ira took off her coat and hung it up. Then she took it down and moved it to another hook because she had hung it on the wrong one the first time.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” he called from inside the room.
Ira froze.
His voice sounded completely normal, with exactly the same intonation he had used when asking her questions in the evenings for the past eleven years.
No guilt.
No caution.
No hesitation.
“Mom called,” she said.
That wasn’t entirely true.
Her mother hadn’t called. Ira’s aunt in Voronezh had. She had said that Ira’s mother was bedridden again and that the doctors were saying something about her heart. But her mother had forbidden the aunt from telling Ira because there was no reason to worry her.
“So how is she?”
“Fine. Blood pressure.”
“Are you going?”
“I’ll decide in the morning.”
Silence.
Then the bed creaked.
He got up, came up behind her, and placed his hands on her shoulders.
He smelled of mint chewing gum and someone else’s perfume—sweet, with a faint citrus note.
Ira drew her shoulder blades together.
“Tired?” she asked without turning around.
“A little. Dinner dragged on.”
“And how were the business partners?”
“Forget them. They want a price below market value, and the volumes they’re offering are ridiculous.”
He removed his hands and went into the bathroom.
Ira heard the water running.
She remained in the hallway, staring at the coat rack and watching drops of water fall from her own coat onto the floor.
A small dark, uneven puddle was forming near the doorway.
Ira didn’t move.
Eventually, she went into the kitchen, took a cloth, wiped up the water, and rehung her coat over the bathroom door.
She didn’t sleep that night.
She lay on her back listening to Valera breathe—steady, with a faint whistle every time he exhaled, a sound so familiar that it now made her sick.
She wanted to turn toward him and ask:
“Who is she?”
But somehow that question no longer mattered.
Something else mattered.
He had stood on the sidewalk holding that woman by the elbow, completely, unbearably calm.
People didn’t say goodbye like that after a business dinner.
That was how you closed a door behind someone with whom you had just lived a small, separate life.
Ira got up at six the next morning.
She put the kettle on and then immediately switched it off because she didn’t want to hear the noise.
She put on a tracksuit and packed a bag.
Valera came out of the bedroom, sleepy and wearing wrinkled lounge pants. He stopped in the doorway and stretched.
“Where are you going?”
“To Voronezh. To see Mom.”
“So early?”
“Traffic.”
He nodded and scratched his cheek.
Then he went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of tap water.
Ira stood near the door with her bag and watched him drink, watched his Adam’s apple move.
She had known him for so long that she already knew exactly what he was going to say next.
“Be careful on the highway. There are speed cameras after the turn toward Yelets.”
He always said that whenever she drove somewhere alone.
“Be careful on the highway. There are speed cameras after the turn toward Yelets.”
“I remember.”
She closed the door without kissing him.
It was the first thing she had done deliberately.
The drive took five hours.
Ira didn’t turn on any music or listen to the radio. The window was slightly open, and the wind struck her cheek, cooling her skin.
Before entering the city, she stopped at a gas station and bought her mother some oranges and a bottle of green pills—the same ones her mother had asked her to buy during her previous visit.
Valera’s phone remained silent.
So did hers.
Her aunt met her outside the apartment building, lips pursed.
“Finally. I keep telling her, ‘Call your daughter,’ and she says, ‘Irochka has her own life.’ What life, Ira? Have you looked at yourself in the mirror?”
Ira didn’t answer.
Her mother was lying beside the window in a four-bed hospital room.
Her cheeks had become even more hollow, but her eyes were clear and sharp.
When she saw Ira, she didn’t smile.
She narrowed her eyes.
“Something drove you here. Out with it.”
Ira sat on the edge of the bed and placed the bag of oranges on the bedside table.
A pair of glasses, an empty glass, and a worn prayer book lay there.
Ira picked up the prayer book and leafed through it aimlessly.
“Nothing drove me here. I just missed you.”
“You’re a terrible liar, Irka. Always have been. Even when you were little and tried to hide a bad grade, your ears would turn red.”
Ira closed the prayer book and put it back.
Her mother looked at her, and there was no sympathy in her expression. There was irritation instead—as though her daughter had once again arrived without first sorting herself out and would now sit beside her expecting answers.
“Valera?” her mother asked.
“Why do you immediately assume it’s Valera?”
“Because there’s nobody else in your life. Thank God.”
Ira gave a short laugh.
Thank God.
Indeed.
“Mom, how did you find out Dad was cheating on you?”
Her mother turned toward the window.
Beyond the glass, the wet branches of linden trees were dark from the previous night’s rain.
A nurse carrying an IV stand walked past.
“I didn’t. He confessed himself. Came home, sat down on a stool, and told me. I was making dumplings at the time. There I was with flour all over my hands, and he sat there saying, ‘Nina, I can’t go on like this anymore.’”
“And what did you do?”
“Finished making the dumplings. Then I went into the bedroom and sat there until morning. He spent the entire night sitting on that stool because he was afraid to come in.”
“And in the morning?”
“In the morning, I packed his things.”
Ira was silent.
The bag of oranges began slipping from the bedside table, and she pushed it back.
“Did you love him?”
“I did. I loved him until the day he died. But I couldn’t live with him anymore. Those are two different things, Ira.”
Her mother turned toward the wall.
Ira thought the conversation was over, but then her mother added quietly:
“He wore my heart away. Piece by piece.”
Ira stayed in Voronezh for four days.
Her mother began recovering and complained that she was bored and that Ira’s aunt had once again brought her the wrong kind of cultured milk.
Valera called twice.
The first time, he asked how her mother was doing.
Ira said she was fine.
The second time, he asked when Ira was coming home.
She said she didn’t know.
He was silent for a moment.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Are you?”
“Yes.”
And that was all.
On the fifth day, Ira got into her car and drove home.
As she approached the building, she noticed the kitchen light glowing in the window.
Valera was waiting for her.
Not by the door.
By the window.
He stood with his palms resting on the windowsill, looking down into the courtyard.
Ira didn’t get out of the car immediately.
Rain was drizzling again, drops collecting on the windshield, and through the wet glass Valera’s figure blurred like a reflection in dark water.
There were two plates on the table, napkins, and an unopened bottle of wine.
Valera stood at the stove stirring something in a frying pan.
Ira removed her coat without taking her eyes off him.
“Dinner?” she asked.
“Yeah. You’ve just had a long drive.”
He turned around, and Ira could see that he was making an effort.
Too much of an effort.
It was what he always did when he felt guilty about some minor offense—forgetting his mother-in-law’s birthday, losing his temper, buying the wrong thing.
Then too, he would cook dinner and open a bottle of wine.
Ira sat down.
She wasn’t hungry, but she picked up her fork.
Buckwheat fried with mushrooms.
Once, that dish had been their Sunday ritual.
Before he had stopped being home on Sundays.
“So how’s your mother?” Valera asked, sitting opposite her.
“They’re discharging her. My aunt will stay with her for a while.”
“That’s good.”
He poured the wine.
Their glasses touched.
Ira brought hers to her lips but didn’t drink.
She watched him drink quickly, almost greedily, as though he needed to lubricate his throat before saying something difficult.
“Ir, I wanted to tell you…”
“Don’t,” she said.
He froze with the glass in his hand.
“You don’t even know what I want to say.”
“I do. And you don’t need to.”
He put down the glass.
His hand started to rise toward his face, but he stopped himself.
Ira noticed.
It was that same gesture—he would have rubbed the bridge of his nose if he hadn’t known that she had noticed long ago that he did it whenever he lied.
“Ir, listen…”
“I saw you outside the restaurant. On Thursday.”
Silence.
The buckwheat cooled on their plates.
Water clicked inside the radiator, making Ira flinch.
“Were you following me?” he asked.
There was no anger in his voice.
Only relief.
As though he had been waiting for this conversation for a long time and had been afraid she would never ask.
“I came to pick you up. I wanted you to call Mom. Your phone wasn’t answering.”
Valera nodded.
His fingers rested loosely on the table, palms down.
He was calm.
The same calm he had shown on the sidewalk when closing the taxi door behind that woman.
“Her name is Asya,” he said.
Ira felt something cold spreading through her chest.
It wasn’t pain.
It was closer to indifference.
She watched his lips pronounce the name—short, silly, girlish.
“She’s from Smolensk. We met at a conference. It only started recently.”
Recently.
A word that was apparently supposed to explain everything.
Ira caught herself counting the syllables in Russian.
Ne-dav-no.
Three.
She remained silent, and Valera began speaking faster, trying to fill the pause.
“I don’t know what to do about it. I didn’t want you to find out. I’m not planning to leave.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“Why aren’t you planning to leave?”
He stopped.
He picked up his glass, took a sip, and put it down again.
Ira could see a vein pulsing at his temple.
Everything was so predictable that she became bored.
Bored of watching a man she had known for eleven years trying to sit on two chairs at once without knocking either of them over.
“Because I love you,” he finally said.
“And her?”
“I don’t know. Differently.”
Differently.
Suddenly Ira remembered their trip to Crimea two years earlier.
One morning Valera had stepped onto the balcony wearing nothing but swimming trunks, and an elderly woman in the apartment below had shouted:
“Sir, have some decency!”
Valera had laughed.
“I’m in my own home!”
Ira had laughed too.
Now she wanted to ask him:
Where is your home, Valera?
Which one of these lives is it in?
She stood and walked to the window.
On the windowsill lay a knitted doily her mother had made about ten years earlier. There was a hole in one corner where an iron had burned through it.
Ira had never thrown it away.
She had barely even noticed it.
Now the hole seemed impossible not to see.
“Well, there’s my present,” Ira said, looking into the window.
The rain had stopped outside.
There was only darkness and their reflections in the glass.
“What?”
“You asked what I wanted for my birthday. Remember? I said I didn’t know. Well, here’s my present. You and that woman from Smolensk. The fact that you’re not leaving, that you’re sitting here lying straight to my face.”
He stood too.
He came up behind her but didn’t touch her.
Ira could see his reflection.
He was a head taller than she was, shoulders hunched, arms hanging by his sides.
He had never known what to do with his hands when he was guilty.
“I’m not lying.”
“Of course not. You ‘love her differently.’ Very convenient. You can love as many people as you want as long as the sentence sounds beautiful.”
“Ira…”
“Ir. Call me Ir, like you always do. There’s no need to make it sound solemn.”
He fell silent.
Then he went back to the table and sat down.
Ira remained beside the window.
The silence between them was like the unfinished buckwheat on their plates—cold and sticky.
About five minutes passed.
Ira thought about having to go to work tomorrow.
About the annual planning she still hadn’t finished.
About the milk in the refrigerator that would soon go sour.
She thought about her mother in Voronezh, probably already asleep.
About her aunt calling in the morning to ask whether she had arrived safely.
And about how Ira would have to give her some cheerful answer.
“When was the last time you wanted me?” she asked without turning around.
“What?”
“When. Was. The. Last. Time. You. Wanted. Me.”
He said nothing.
Ira turned around.
He was staring at the table, turning his fork between his fingers.
The fork slipped and clattered against the plate.
“I don’t remember,” he said.
Ira nodded.
She took the knitted doily from the windowsill, folded it into quarters, and placed it on the table.
Then she went into the hallway and put on her coat.
“Where are you going?”
“To get some air.”
“At night? Ir, let’s talk.”
“We already talked. You said everything you wanted to say. I heard you.”
She opened the door.
With one hand on the handle, she stopped on the threshold.
Valera stood in the kitchen doorway, light falling across one side of him and making his face look older.
Ira looked at him and understood:
There he was.
Her husband.
The man with whom she had shared bedsheets and debts for eleven years.
She knew everything about him—how he rubbed his eyes in the morning, how he swore in traffic jams, how terrified he was of dentists.
But that knowledge weighed nothing.
It was like dust on a windowsill.
It existed, but it couldn’t hold anything together.
“You were holding her by the elbow,” Ira said. “That’s how I knew immediately. Holding someone by the elbow isn’t about sex. It’s about tenderness. It means you’re afraid she might fall.”
He flinched.
He opened his mouth but said nothing.
Ira closed the door behind her.
She went downstairs and stepped into the courtyard.
The rain had stopped.
The air was damp and warm.
She got into the car and started the engine.
Her hands rested on the steering wheel, but she didn’t move.
She looked up at the windows of her apartment.
The kitchen light was still on.
Valera was standing at the window exactly as he had been before she arrived.
Looking down.
She could see his silhouette, motionless as a target.
Then he stepped away.
The light went out.
Ira shifted into gear and drove out of the courtyard.
Ahead of her stretched the nighttime highway, empty and shining after the rain.
It led neither to Voronezh nor to Smolensk.
It simply went forward.
Ira didn’t know where she would end up.
She knew only one thing.
She wasn’t going back.
The knitted doily with the burned hole remained on the windowsill of the apartment.
Ira never went back for it.
Perhaps Valera would throw it away in the morning.
Perhaps he would leave it there and keep noticing it whenever he walked past.
It no longer mattered.
Objects had lives of their own.
And hers was beginning another one.
