LITMIR.BIZ

      The Lopasnya here swept out a broad, deep bend, and the spring breeze that flowed in the clear air followed its curve – fresh and free-spirited, it followed the water. I too was drawn there, but the sticky, ribbed clay banks were not overgrown yet as they are in summer with waxy-topped, velvet undersided leaves of mother-and-stepmother, with lush burdock and with strong-stemmed horsetails, and it was impossible to get down to the river, especially as the spring melt was flooding ever more of the shallow banks.

      But there was the small blue wooden bridge, which I crossed to meet you from the local bus that came out from Moscow once a day. It was a hard meeting. It was clear you wanted to break with me, yet didn’t know how to, which is why you were so sharp – rough and desperate because you knew nothing would work out, this way or that, because life, despite its dreams and vague desires, was already plunging into the chill flow of obscurity, swept away in deep, strong currents that surged under the blue, blue bridge.

      What we didn’t know then was that bridge bound us together forever, eye-to-eye as we toiled with bitter jealousy of our separate pasts – I jealous of the things I didn’t know and would never discover, and you of the constant Senezhes and Intercession on the Nerls of my flights to going-nowhere isolation.

      The sky was blue. The wind flapped and spread the drooping branches of the birches, their trunks full of sun near the top but pink from sap near the bole. Stunted, pale-green pines were candling together up to the sky, while in the damp soil on the river slope yellow and shining mother-and-stepmother blooms spilled almost to the inaccessible water’s edge. Muddying my boots, I snatched a flower for you – but it was no use, and soon it flew from the bridge into the churning, unstoppable currents of the Lopasnya.

      Even after a few years our emotions were still disturbed, and their continuation was so acutely painful that they culminated in what was to me an appalling separation that seemed so belated that it could have neither success nor justification. Only unconscious non-existence and desperate reading saved me from the dark abyss. Day and night, traffic streamed along the Enthusiasts’ Highway, and trains clattered under the bridge, slowed down through Novaya station and rumbled punctually on. The tall window glowed with the morning light or the bright stripes shining up at night from the streetlights below, and on I read and re-read, reading someone else’s words and mistaking them for my own. Then one day I looked at the little flower from Izmailovsky Park again and found to my surprise that it not only had not withered, but was growing so stubbornly it had spilled right over the edge and crept across the edge of the window sill, extending its ringed, scaly indestructible stem.

      This will for life so struck me that I started to observe the mother-and-stepmother flower daily – and maybe because of my bookishness I began to think there was something symbolic about it, some sign for me – but of course there was nothing, and where would it come from anyway? Yet the flower kept on stretching and growing and sprouting in front of my eyes, and simultaneously I sensed life beginning outside, and what had seemed irretrievable flowing back – until finally I woke up and realized I had no burden and I closed my eyes, opened my heart and took flight into the new space in which there was everything but the fear of darkness.

      The darkness, of course, was there, but there were stars too – each one, if you looked closely, resembling that radiant flower, that in authentic reality is a giant, dazzling sun, compared to which the sun that shines from the sky is just a weak spring sun, surrounded by the busy bees of our attention.

      KARAOKE

      By the time Nina got back from Klayz’ma, it was already nearly dark in Moscow. Snow, yellow under the streetlights, was flying down for the second time this year. The first fall had come in November and soon melted, leaving a ghastly slush. It was uncertain if this new snow would settle itself lastingly on the ground – if it would tame the sticky slime of puddles and stir, even for a while, an indifferent gaze with its infant purity, or if it would quickly and futilely melt away according to the newly established, indifferent mechanics of natural processes, in which a misty winter delivers rain that can bring neither joy nor disappointment to now wingless souls – and where every unconscious impulse becomes enfeebled and dwindles to nothing like the Sunday snow uselessly scattering its flakes under the streetlamps in Moscow’s damp dusk.

      The descending darkness nearly caught Nina on the road. But it didn’t. The car, a new Lada, had run like clockwork. In the lobby, Nina, relaxed by the journey, smiled at the unsleeping concierge. The lobby light was working, and the lift didn’t let her down either. As she entered her single flat, Nina was wrapped by its reliable warmth and felt the small irritations of life drop away. Not only was there hot water, but the tap in the bathroom omitted to bark back with its habitual ferocity. And the other day the plumber, surprisingly sober, had fixed the shower by changing the ancient and leaking chrome hose for a shiny new Italian one.

      Now, after throwing off her purple sheepskin coat with its furry cowl, she filled the bath with scented herbal foam, just as she used to. She could sink into it, close her eyes and ignore the little icy drops that fell occasionally on her face. She could put some gentle music on, and leave the bathroom door slightly ajar, too – so that the air from the entrance hall kept the big, oval mirror from clouding as it did if she shut the door completely, leaving Nina to wipe it crossly with the end of her thick towel in order to reveal her flushed face, her refreshed chestnut curls rumpled with drying, and her still strong body in its pure and uncomplicated nakedness.

      Anyway, even without the music, there was no reason to shut the door. Nobody could see her in the secure seclusion of her little flat, that was like a handy cosmetic box in which all things, both useful and useless, can find their own special place. In Nina’s wardrobe, for instance, hung a forgotten fur coat that once seemed so alive and animated that it begged to be stroked and spoken to. In the living room, that was at the same time a bedroom and a studio, there was her computer, her books and paintings. And on the kitchen wall dangled the shiny gold circle of a frying pan, with a long polished handle, in which she’d had such fun in former times making gooseberry jam.

      To a casual visitor, Nina’s apartment block might look like a grim fortress tower where someone might hide from the inevitable grievances of being. But Nina didn’t encourage visitors. On her salary from the advertising agency, she could actually have afforded a bigger place, but in her personal retreat nothing annoyed or disturbed her. The flat suited Nina because it was a perfect fit, like the bathroom, for her new routine of life. She could draw the drapes on her eighth floor windows, leave just the kitchen light on and a candle burning in front of the tiny icon of the Mother of God brought from Cyprus, undress entirely, wrap herself in a dressing gown, take the few steps to the bathroom and slide into the piping hot water.

As she lay in the bath, the sensation of the water suddenly took her back to some long forgotten time when she was a child. Clear blue sky. Vest, knickers, a panama hat. A host of evocative smells. And the dark, smooth path to the bathhouse, over nettles and star-shaped night blindness¹⁰ with its soft hairs, past dense thickets of raspberry-red fireweeds, past yellow tansies and lacy snow-white lungwort. Young pines exuding a rich aroma of sun. Lacewings and pop-eyed dragonflies flitting and hovering in the shimmering air. Behind was the carved wooden verandah of the kindergarten’s dacha, from which they were led in small groups to bathe nearby in the spacious borrowed bathhouse on the fringes of the village. Beyond the bathhouse spread a vast field, green with ears of wheat but splashed blue with cornflowers, wheat waving in the breeze – going on, on, on, right to the far blue sky, never ending, like the life within the ripening seeds. And finally that pure sensation of the skin stepping into the water – so sharp, bright, wonderful. As she lay in the bath, Nina, held by the imperishable spirit in her, waited for it all to flood back to her. But not this time.

      Now the shock of the water reminded her of something completely different – the foggy, pre-winter lane from the dacha where that afternoon she had parted from her husband for the week again. It was three years now they had been living apart, without thinking about divorce – he, a physicist working in the defence industry in some institutional settlement in the Moscow suburbs, while she, who remembered Moscow’s

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