THERE WILL BE NO FOURTH ROME

LARISA’S WAS AN OLD APARTMENT. Large, with high ceilings and wide, crisscrossing parquet boards. The parquet, like the chairs and table, had been bleached by light from the balcony, a narrow cement structure that opened to a wild yard two stories down. It was eleven in the morning, and I was on the balcony searching for the laundry I’d hung out the night before. I glanced down at the ferns and shrubs: between a patch of skinny birches a stray plastic bag was getting tugged and jerked in the wind. I had been staying with Larisa in Moscow for a week, and whenever I looked down into the yard I thought I was seeing the blurred outlines of footpaths, the turns of old gardens. It could have once been a tidy park, I thought, now abandoned to weeds. But then again it may always have looked like this, for all the fifty years the apartment had been in Larisa’s family.

My mother had told me Larisa was old Moscow intelligentsia, though technically “old” went back only as far as two generations in a place like Russia, where the real old intelligentsia had fled or been shot during the Revolution. Larisa’s father had in fact come from Belarusian peasant stock and had risen to become a diplomat in Hungary and China, and then had taught at the Institute of International Affairs, where Larisa herself had studied. But all these honors and distinctions meant nothing to Larisa, my mother had also said, for Larisa judged people by “the reflections cast off their soul,” which in Mama’s lexicon was just another way of saying that Larisa wasn’t an anti-Semite.

I was still looking for my laundry when Larisa surfaced from her bedroom. She was wrapped in her old lavender bathrobe. Pieces of her steely blond hair stuck out at angles from her head. She looked at me, and then beyond me at the bright morning. “Did I sleep in again?” she said, rubbing an eye. “I got up at five this morning. Mur woke me.”

The cat crawled out of the bedroom and leapt onto the plastic sheeting of the balcony’s edge. He was black and, like all cats, a little obnoxious.

“Have you seen my clothes, Aunt Larisa?” I asked.

Her eyes were still foggy from sleep or myopia. “Oh yes.” She raised a palm to her forehead. “I thought it might rain this morning. I took them down and hung them on the pipe.” She turned around and shuffled back to her bedroom, slippers scratching the floor, and returned a minute later with a tidy folded stack.

I carried my clothes into the study, where I slept, while Larisa went into the kitchen for a cigarette. She’d made it a point not to smoke anywhere else in the apartment as long as I was there. Why she had decided to limit her tobacco to the place where we ate, I didn’t ask. Like the bathroom, the kitchen was a room of mere function to her. Larisa made no rituals around meals and our dinners usually consisted of boiled hot dogs, cucumber salad, and tea. Occasionally she’d open the freezer and poke around in the permafrost until she found a stiff bag of pelmeni, then throw those in the boiling water, too. Still, every evening when I returned she made sure to ask if I was hungry and, whatever my answer, would start boiling water at once.

Larisa Lebedeva was an old friend of my parents’. Or rather she’d become their friend when she’d married my father’s boyhood pal Alexei. When my parents and I had flown to Moscow sixteen years earlier to complete the paperwork we needed to leave the country forever, the Lebedevs had put us up. It was a favor not many of my parents’ friends were willing to extend, not wanting to be linked with those absconding the homeland. Four years after we left the country, Alexei left Larisa. But it was Larisa my parents stayed in contact with, believing that in spite of their longer record with Alexei, she was the one who now needed their support. These are only the ordinary patterns of divorce, and I am sure my parents’ estrangement from Alexei would have been temporary had he not died a year later. When Larisa called them in New York to tell them of Alyosha’s death, they had grieved with her as if she were his widow.

From the week we’d stayed with her as her guest on Boystovskaya Street sixteen years earlier, I had remembered Larisa as a tall, soft-spoken blonde in rounded octagonal lenses that covered half her face. She was one of those women who are at once both large and delicate. And she was exactly this way now, age having thickened her a bit in the hips. Also, she had traded the tinted French frames for more modern squarish ones.

I got dressed and went into the kitchen for breakfast. Larisa had cut up some black bread and a cucumber and set out a glass bowl of cheese spread. The windows were dashed open, but the smoke stayed inside, drifting in a pillow above our heads.

Larisa pulled up at the thread of her tea bag. She didn’t brew her tea. “When are you meeting your friend?” she asked.

“Two o’clock,” I told her. “Nona and her boyfriend are picking me up on Tverskaya.”

“The German?” she said.

I nodded. “She’s pregnant.” I did a little thing with my brows. I didn’t know why I was announcing this, apart from feeling guilty for leaving Larisa alone another day.

“Is he going to marry her?”

“I guess so. Why not?”

Larisa blew on her tea. “Men,” she said.

I’d had trouble reaching Nona all week. Larisa’s telephone was an old rotary that had its line fused with a neighbor’s. Whenever I picked up, there’d be a busy signal, occasionally overlaid with the faraway quikchatter of Russian. Other times Nona wasn’t home. When she called back, I was out walking around the city and she was forced to leave messages with Larisa. Finally we had caught each other and agreed to meet. She was taking the train in from Ivanovo today.

Nona Gabunia had been my mother’s best math student. The Gabunias were also our neighbors on the outskirts of Tbilisi, in a cement neighborhood that was forever under construction. We had heard almost nothing from their family during the Georgian Civil War until Nona called my mother from Krasnodar, where the Russian government had given land to refugees from the republics, and said that one way or another she had to leave.

My mother searched for exchange programs; one summer she found Nona a job as a counselor at an international camp in Vermont. Another year as a short-order cook in Cape Cod. But the problem was always the same: the American embassy kept turning her away. She was single and pretty and didn’t have residency in one of the capital cities. Girls like Nona didn’t come back; they became nannies and, if everything went as planned, married simple American boys from their night accounting classes. To that end, my mother had even involved her next-door neighbor Justin, a man whose wife had walked out one day, leaving him in full care of their three-year-old, a little boy whose abrupt and stifled movements shared no resemblance to the agile reflexes of other children on the street. My mother had waited a week after Justin’s wife had left, then knocked on his door and gave him Nona’s e-mail and a passport photo. For several months he and Nona wrote to each other. I know this only because the real correspondence went on between Justin and my mother, to whom Nona was forwarding all of his e-mails for a line-by-line translation. She had studied French, unfortunately, not English. By this time she was studying at medical school in Ivanovo, and my mother was peppering her letters with lines such as “I love children, especially sick ones.” But one day, when the wife’s car reappeared in Justin’s driveway, our hopes for Nona were dashed once again.

Larisa stood up and poured what was left of her tea into the sink. “I’m going out today too, Regina,” she smiled gaily. “By myself. I’m going to be a tourist!” She reached up to the top of the refrigerator and pawed around for her pack of cigarettes. “I’m going to the historical library to look up my father’s books. They might have my uncle’s, too. I’ve always wanted to do that.” She grabbed the pack and maneuvered a match from a tiny box by the stove. “Do you think I should take the cane or the umbrella?”

Larisa asked this question whenever she left the apartment. She preferred the umbrella. But in the metro only a cane could proffer any hope that someone might stand up and offer her a seat. Except that to hear Larisa debate it, most of the time the cane didn’t do any good either. If anything, it just gave them reason to stare you down like it was your fault you were alive. No regard for invalids at all. She had fractured her hip in a fall and, for an entire year, had not left her apartment. Her boyfriend, Misha, had nursed her to health. Now she was living off her small invalid’s pension and some of the money Misha made from his job at an aviation plant.

“The umbrella,” I said. I got up, rinsed my dish, and left it facedown on the cutting board Larisa used as a drying rack. She exhaled a band of smoke into the window screen.

“I’ll see you this evening, Aunt Larisa,” I said, and headed out.

         

“How’s this different from your plans for her and Justin?” I had asked my mother when I’d come home to borrow a suitcase. I had told her about Nona’s pregnancy, which I’d learned of only when I’d called Nona to say I was flying to Moscow.

“I don’t know this other man,” my mother said. “I know Justin. He is a good man.”

“But if I was your daughter, would you send me off to live with someone I barely knew? Who didn’t speak my language, and who had a retarded kid on top of it?”

“What do you mean if?” she said. “And why is everything about you?” She examined my face. When she didn’t understand something, she had a way of scanning it as if she was looking for acne. “They gave you vacation time so close to tax season?” she asked skeptically. “Did you do something bad?”

“No,” I said, and hauled the suitcase to the side door.

She turned to the sink and poured herself a glass of water. She didn’t believe me. A thatch of penny-colored hair glittered on her temple. My mother hadn’t grown her first gray hair until she was forty-five, and even now she only used henna, refusing commercial dyes because of the unnamed health risks. “Some vacation,” she murmured to herself. She didn’t see why anyone would go to that country. “Those people will insult you and humiliate you,” she liked to say. “And it will cost them nothing.”

         

I had called in sick to work, expedited my visa, and found a plane ticket. Then I called again and in a shaky voice dropped the words “family” and “emergency,” leaving enough room for interpretation so our secretary could only imagine the worst. I was sure when I came back, I’d find a condolence card in my box signed by the entire office. A small part of me hoped Conrad would try to call me at home. There is an axiom in accounting which states that if bad data is entered into a system, the outcome will also be invalid. Garbage In, Garbage Out. Such was the nature of our romance.

I’d noticed Conrad right away, the first month I started working at C&R. He’s one of those men who is like a collie, large and enthusiastic at strange moments. At any given time, if you are to watch him, his face will be scrunched up like somebody has just pissed him off. So when he breaks, suddenly, into one of his grins, you can’t help but think that this change of spirit has something to do with you. Maybe it was the hot-and-cold thing that gave him the impression of being someone who’d peaked a little too early in life. A former athlete, maybe a swimmer, because he had the frame of one, but who’d let his muscles go soft. Right away I suspected he looked better with his clothes on than off, and that he probably knew it, too. I wasn’t very far off about that.

I was hired in January, when the hours were still reasonable and not like the hours in the spring, when accountants start looking like the walking dead. When all they can do is sit at conference tables until one in the morning sipping coffee and giggling at the financial statements and spreadsheets in front of them, like teenagers experimenting with nitrous oxide. I hadn’t spoken to Conrad then. He worked in sales, persuading discount stores along the coast to buy C&R’s bar code scanners and credit card readers. People were still eating their lunches at the cafeteria then, and one day I’d found myself facing the buffet, mesmerized with indecision, until Conrad walked up beside me and laid his elbow, very entertainingly, on my empty plate.

I doubt I was the first person he’d pulled that particular magic on. A week before, I’d heard one of the secretaries say, “He loooves to throw around sexual innuendos,” and knew immediately who they were talking about. They gossiped about him with the disparaging affection women reserve for men they pretend not to be interested in.

“His mom cleans houses,” said one of them. “He just bought her a condo.”

“Sounds like a good son.”

“A provider.” And then they’d both laughed.

“Did you see what kind of car he drives?”

“It’s big,” said the one still laughing. “And it’s got a really low seat.”

“He luuves his car,” said the other, drawing out the “uuh” so it rhymed with “duh.”

A few weeks later Conrad drove me home in his low-seated car, keeping one warm hand on my knee. And at the end of the ride I made it easy and invited him up. From the beginning our efforts were more compulsive than passionate. He left before it was light, that time and the next. Only a month later, when his wife was away, attending a conference paid for by pharmaceutical companies, and his daughter was sleeping over at a friend’s, did he spend the whole night.

Whenever I think about what happened, I get stuck on that old proverb—look not where you fell but where you slipped. One Sunday morning he turned on the TV while I got ready to shower. A baseball game was on a sports channel I never watched. Conrad doesn’t watch much baseball, either; he’s someone who likes the game only for the statistics. I stepped out of the bathroom and stood in the doorway, looking at the tiny men run, followed by the swift pans of invisible cameras that hovered in space like satellites. “I’ve never gone to a baseball game,” I said a little coyly. He twisted his head to look at me but seemed unsurprised. This is one thing about not growing up in America; you are always discovering new gaps in your education: names of gemstones, rules in sports.

“Then you should go,” he said.

“Not by myself. I’d want someone next to me explaining everything.”

He pulled me down to the bed. “I can teach you right now.”

But I didn’t want that. I looked at him for another second, and finally he shrugged in response. A more formal invitation was not forthcoming. I went into the bathroom and Conrad went back to watching TV.

“Why can’t you take me?” I said when I walked back in. “What’s wrong with doing something other than”—I thrust a hand at the bed—“this!”

He had another look—one you could see as either sleepy or amorous, a smile that told me he was too exhausted to deny the charges. He could manage somehow to be arrogant even when he looked defeated. “That isn’t how I meant it, Regina. You know I’d love to take you out,” he said. “You don’t want to know what kind of chokehold I’m in right now. I’ve got two weeks to make my numbers for the quarter, and I can’t even close a deal with my biggest buyer. He’s been pulling my dick by a string all month.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed. “How big of a sale do you need?”

“Eight hundred thousand.” Conrad pressed his thumb and finger into the pits of his eyes, then pushed himself off the mattress and out of bed. “Story of my life,” he said.

A week passed before I saw Conrad again. He caught my elbow by the women’s room. He must have been lingering there, in the alcove with the brass drinking fountain, waiting until I walked by to draw me around.

“Guess what I got?” He waved a stack of invoices and purchase orders. “If these land on your desk this week, will you okay them?”

I snatched a look at the purchase orders. “You got them to sign!”

“I just waived their restocking fee.”

“That was the deal you made? So they can ship back everything next month?”

“They’re just helping me out, Regina.”

I glanced down the hall to the senior accounting office.

Conrad put his hands, with the papers, on my shoulders. “Come on, don’t jump ship on me now. If you make a fuss about this to those shylocks, no way it’s going through.”

If you are a clear-thinking person, this is when you cut your losses. But it is never so simple: with someone new, you have to lay the groundwork all over again. At least I do. It wasn’t until the bonuses were handed out that Conrad finally took me on a proper date. We drove out the first Friday of March, the roads to Connecticut stained and cracking from the salt. He studied the menu of drinks while I watched the dimming and turning of the sky above the Mystic Seaport, through the inn’s tall windows.

“Are you having a good time?” he said.

I nodded.

“You have to learn to relax, Regina. I can hear it.”

I looked at him, his hair still wet from the shower he’d taken. Nice, lightly wavy hair that always looks best right before the next cut.

“Your mind. It’s always ticking,” he said. He drew my hands together and bent down to kiss them, in gratitude.

         

“I need a ride to work,” I asked one morning a few weeks later. I’d left my Impala in the shop, knowing he’d be spending the night.

“I thought you wanted to be discreet about this.”

“What?” I said. Where did he learn these bait-and-switches? “Co-workers give each other rides all the time.”

“You’re the one who’s been ignoring me.”

“Why would I do that?” I said.

“I thought you didn’t want to act too cozy while they’re looking into the deal.”

I felt the roof of my mouth become dry.

“You were right,” he said. “They returned all our merchandise.”

“You said they weren’t going to.”

“I said they might not.”

He’d turned around and started putting on his jacket. “Don’t worry. People know that new accountants forget to flag return charges. It happens all the time.”

“Are you dumping this on me?” I said.

“Calm down. Nothing’s gonna happen to you. You haven’t been working here very long. Just say you didn’t know all the rules.”

“You asked me to help you!”

“We made a mistake. It happens.”

“That’s real artful,” I said, following him to the door. “I get nailed while you stand around like an ignorant Boy Scout.”

He looked at me as though I were the ignorant one. “Fine. Drag me in and the SEC will call it fraud. It’s up to you, Regina.”

We drove along the Saw Mill River Parkway. I kept my window rolled down to feel the spring chill on my neck and ears. I glanced at his profile, which was the first and last thing I’d ever liked about Conrad. The handsome ridge of his up-tight brow, the nostril that was like the quick hook of some crochet needle, and the million-dollar chin. The first time I had seen his profile, I’d thought: I could have sex with a profile like that.

He turned up the heat fans, in spite of my open window. I suppose he was still pretending I wasn’t sitting in his car. He fiddled with the radio, scrolling from talk to music, which somehow made our silent situation all the more excruciating. We were on Route 9-A now, almost at our office complex, when Conrad slowed down and pulled over into the parking lot of the Saw Mill Multiplex Cinemas.

“You’re making me walk?” I said.

“Jesus, Regina. We’re less than a hundred yards from the office. It’s a two-minute walk.”

I stepped out and slammed the door. The car circled around and started to climb up the parking ramp. I’d been sweating and my skin was suddenly cold with moisture. I stood between the yellow parking stripes of the multiplex and watched Conrad’s Camaro glide back into traffic. And then, in the early moments of despair, I became possessed with the sensational and radical idea of walking into the movie theater and spending the rest of my day nestled in its easy velvet darkness. I walked across the asphalt and up the wide steps of the cinema and pressed my forehead against the plate-glass doors. The place was empty. I turned back and saw there were only two cars in the parking lot. The others would not start arriving until one o’clock in the afternoon for the first matinee screenings. There was nothing left to do but walk the quarter-mile to work.

I slid my badge through the slot and entered the lobby. Before I climbed up to my world of desks and plastic dividers, I tried the doors of all the fire exits and found, behind one, a heap of cardboard boxes. From my desk I dialed a car and started packing. I left all my papers as they were and dropped into the box only my personals: three pairs of shoes that had accumulated under my desk, a few vials of dried perfume rolling around in my pen drawer, and a crushed Milky Way bar with its cold caramel scent. I carried the box out under my arm and took an elevator to the lobby, where I waited for the taxi to take me home.

         

On Friday I waited for Nona by an entrance to one of the underpasses on a crowded Pushkin Square. A boy of around sixteen was leaning unsteadily against the marble parapet, shaking the last drops of his beer into his mouth. His friends had tossed their bottles over the rampart and shouted for him to move it. He wobbled, then looked for a place to plant his bottle and decided on the spot right by his feet. “Young person!” a woman street-cleaner shouted down at him. “Young person!” He ignored her and lumbered unsteadily down the steps. “Retard,” she called again, and returned to her sweeping.

From behind the parked cars I heard my name. “Regina!” a tall young woman was shouting. Her hair was dark, cropped closely around her face. In the passport photos Nona had sent us, she’d had a long, ash-blond braid.

“Your hair!” I laughed when she came close.

She threw her arms around me and gave me a narrow-eyed smile. She had heavy outer lids that made the inner lids all but invisible and gave her eyes a sad, ancient, sexy look.

“I can’t color it while I’ve got this,” she said, and patted her stomach.

“That’s a myth.”

“No, no!” she said in earnest horror. “All those chemicals. I would never do that to any child of mine.”

Mentioning the baby, she turned to the man escorting her. “This is my future husband,” she said with practiced friendly confidence.

“Dieter,” said the man, leaning in to shake.

“Dieter is from Frankfurt,” said Nona. He nodded, confirming. He looked about forty-six or forty-seven. His hair was a mix of several different grays and his cheeks sank in like the faces of men in coin portraits.

“Dieter has to go back to work,” she said. “I thought I’d give you a tour of our warehouse.” She led me to the car, then sidled in beside me in the back. At closer view her face was covered with hot, rosy blotches. “Have you thought about who’s driving you to the airport Sunday?” she said, placing a custodial hand on my arm as Dieter started the car.

“I can take a taxi.”

“That woman, the one you’re staying with…”

“Larisa?” I said.

“When I called, I offered to have Dieter drive you. But she said her husband would do it.”

“Misha?” I was confused. “He’s not her husband,” I said. “Or I don’t think he is.”

“She said he was,” said Nona.

I’d never heard Larisa call Misha her husband, even though he stayed at her apartment five nights a week. By Friday evening, she’d told me, he was always gone, taking the train to Saltykovka where he was building a dacha for his son and daughter. He had divorced their mother ten years before, Larisa had told me, and even now felt guilty. The only person to whom Larisa still referred as her husband was Alexei, who had died nearly twelve years ago.

We drove alongside the river, which reflected the dull luster of the sky. I’d noticed that even without clouds, the sky was rarely transparent. During my first few days in Moscow the pollution had felt suffocating, but now it seemed to add a sawdust luminosity to the city.

Dieter pulled into a fenced-in, unpaved lot. A guard, idling at the gates, nodded us in. A row of white vans sat parked by the warehouse, which resembled a corrugated iron box. A second, bored-looking guard inside sat behind an old wooden writing table. Dieter led us past him down the corridor, where the doors opened into mint-colored rooms with desks and monitors. I watched his back and could see the specter of a delicate frame in spite of the dense torso. His shoulders were sloping and as triangular as a madonna’s. Even in her flat shoes Nona was taller.

The mint-colored rooms were really only one room, I saw, with several doors. At a corner desk a young brunette sat talking on the telephone. She laid down the receiver as soon as Dieter walked in and searched her desk for papers, one eye set on Dieter in grim determination. But her co-worker got to him first, catching him in the doorway with her own questions. That girl was pretty, though her eyebrows looked like they’d been scalded off and then repainted with a ballpoint pen. Without greeting, Dieter took the paper from her hand, scanned it, and pointed to whatever figure was the source of her trouble. She sucked a breath through her teeth as if looking at a painful sore, then took the paper and marched back to her desk on her chunky heels. These girls were young, I thought, and better dressed than Nona. But Dieter hardly seemed aware of this. I wondered if the quality of his attention was different when Nona wasn’t around, but I couldn’t imagine him acting in any way that might be considered playful or provocative. He’d said two words to me in the car and had smiled just once: at a red light when he’d spontaneously lifted his camera off the front seat and tried to convince Nona to let him take a picture of her.

“Let’s go,” Nona said now, as more people lined up with questions for Dieter. She hooked her arm into mine and led me out through the hall and into a massive room at the end of the corridor, where rows and rows of metal shelves made a neat grid of alleys. “Here’s what we’re looking for,” she said, grabbing a box of pantyhose. She gave me a quick head-to-toe, then found a larger size. “You’ll like these.” She tapped her nail on the box. “They fight cellulite.” She tossed the stockings into her bag and craned her neck to inspect the other merchandise. There were neck pillows and creams and massaging brushes and other items of a dubious therapeutic value. Nona grabbed whatever her eyes fell on and tossed it into the bag, until we were at the end of the row, where two older, stern-looking women sat at their respective desks. I guessed they were inventory guards, hired to keep the younger employees from stealing. They bore down their gazes on us, on Nona, in a way I found unsettling. Nona pulled up on the unbuttoned ends of her blouse and, without looking at the women, tied them at her waist so that her bulging belly was on display. One of the guards rolled her eyes, as if she’d seen this act before. Fifteen years ago these women would have been the gatekeepers to everything. They might be working in libraries or in shops, or sitting in some darkened office wielding rubber stamps, in charge of making someone’s life miserable. But Nona was the queen here now, and she knew it. She grabbed more pantyhose off the shelves and stuffed them into her bag with impunity. And when she got to the door, she turned and smiled at the dowagers like a ballerina at the end of her act.

“Does this stuff really work?” I asked, holding up a tube of cellulite cream, while we headed up the stairs.

“Let’s hope,” she said. “But you still won’t look like her.” She pointed to the model on the pantyhose. “That’s Sergei’s bride. He’s Dieter’s partner. You can’t open any business here without a Russian partner. And he’s ripping Dieter off.”

On the second floor I could tell that the warehouse had once been a massive factory, housing machinery that might have been used to make shells or ironing boards. The first door opened to a room where half a dozen girls sat behind sewing machines, stitching together plastic packages for the pantyhose. Their hair flapped in the indraft of a giant fan aiming air at their faces. They looked to be in their twenties, though a few looked younger.

“Nona, vi longen noch!” spoke a voice behind us. It was a man in heavy denim overalls and a foreman’s cap. So Dieter had brought in his own people to manage the workers.

“Otto!” Nona said.

“Wie lange noch?”

“Eine Weile noch,” she said in an exhausted voice. How long had she been studying German? I wondered.

I took a step inside the sewing room while they talked. On one of the walls, and just above the heads of the seamstresses, hung glossy pages ripped from porno magazines. Oiled and muscular men posing with women or alone, their privates smartly covered up by tamer photos of partial nudity. I dug through my bag and found my camera, scanned the room for an angle. Some of the girls had stopped their sewing and looked at me. I raised the aperture and saw that my move had ignited a chain of glances around the room. There was a quality to their looks that was more coordinated than the gazes of the dowagers downstairs. I had stumbled into a beehive. “May I?” I said, though when you are nervous is not the time to ask for permission. Eyes darted from sewing table to sewing table. I heard a snigger in the back. It had come from a tiny blonde by the wall with the porno pictures. So that’s their leader, I thought.

“They don’t pay us enough for that,” she said, getting a laugh from the others. I tried to hide my embarrassment by drawing my camera to my side and squinting up at the ceiling, as if I were a real photographer looking for perfect ambient light. And then I was rescued by Nona at my side. “I’m hungry,” she said. “Let me show you our cafeteria.”

I put the cap on my aperture and glanced back at little Dolores Huerta, who was entertaining the others by pretending to click a camera.

The cafeteria was really just a kitchen with two fat women working the stove. I sat down at a table while Nona brought us a tray of soup bowls. “Eat well for the baby,” a cook called after her.

“So where are you going to have it?” I said.

“In Frankfurt, where else?”

I lifted a steaming spoon of soup to my mouth.

“It’s good, right?” she said. “He really keeps them fed here.”

“Guess what one of your teenage seamstresses said to me upstairs,” I said.

Nona looked up with a cold face.

“I wanted to take a picture, and she told me, ‘They don’t pay me enough for that.’”

“Which one of them said it?” She was suddenly giving me a hard, serious stare.

“I don’t know,” I said. It hadn’t been a pleasant experience, but I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble.

“Was it the little one, with the short hair?”

“I can’t remember.”

“It doesn’t matter. I know which one it was. The little bitch.”

“I was sort of impressed,” I said, trying to make light. “It’s a very American way to answer, ‘They don’t pay me enough for that.’”

“Right,” she said. “Workers of the world. Why don’t we just make a sign for her and let her picket.”

         

I got back to the apartment at eight. Misha was home. He and Larisa were sitting in the kitchen, eating a dinner of boiled pork and cucumber salad.

“Hoa…where…you?” he said in English when I walked in.

“What?” I said.

“How where you?”

“Where were you?” I said, trying to clarify.

Misha shook his head.

“How where you?” he repeated slowly. From the day he’d picked me up at the airport, he’d been testing his English on me. He’d mentioned winning some English-language award when he was in high school sometime in nineteen fifty-something, and I didn’t have the heart to discourage him.

“You mean, how are you?” I said.

“Da!” Misha nodded, and slapped his hands together.

“I am good,” I said, speaking as slowly as he’d spoken to me. “How are you?”

“I…yem…faine,” Misha answered, and broke into a wide grin.

“Would you like some meat?” Larisa said, getting up for a plate.

No thanks, I told her.

Just one piece, she said.

I wasn’t a great lover of boiled meat, I said.

“You liked it two days ago,” she said. And indeed I had. But that was when I’d thought it was beef. I didn’t keep kosher. But I believed that as long as I didn’t eat anything high treif either, I would at least be staying a parallel course. When, toward the end of our first meal of boiled pork, with only a few morsels remaining, I had discovered what I was eating, I’d placed my fork aside and subtly tried to take the last piece I was chewing out with my napkin. And when Larisa had asked me whether I didn’t eat pork, I answered all too cowardly that the piece was too salty for my taste.

“How was your day at the library?” I said, changing the topic.

“Brilliant.” Larisa closed her eyes and inhaled as if she were savoring fresh air. “It turns out my uncle wrote a book, too. A manual on running an orphanage. I knew he ran an orphanage after the Second World War, but I didn’t know he’d written it all down. And how was your day?” she asked.

I told her about my tour of Dieter’s business.

“Ah, biznis,” said Larisa. “I remember it used to be very exciting.” I’d heard the story before, how when everyone had been rushing to open up businesses in Moscow, Larisa’s brother and his wife had opened a chain of flower shops. The money had started flowing in, and soon Larisa left her press department job at the Pushkin Museum to work in one of the stores. But she didn’t work there anymore. She’d fallen and broken her hip in the shop.

As if the memory had reinflamed some old pain, she shifted in her chair and rubbed her palm against her hip.

“Do you think you might go back someday?” I said. “I mean, once you can move around better.”

Misha looked at Larisa.

She shook her head. “No,” she said definitively. “I don’t talk to them anymore.”

“That’s not true,” said Misha. “You talked to your brother two weeks ago.”

“That was about my father’s papers,” she said impatiently, and turned to me. “They blamed me for my injury. His wife had the nerve to tell me I’d let the business down by falling on a flat place.”

“That makes no sense,” I said. I was trying to sound sympathetic, but I had the feeling she was leaving something out.

Larisa shrugged. “That’s what happened.”

I got up. Spending my days getting around the city’s immense distances had taken a toll. I was ready for bed, even though the sky would be light for another two or three hours.

“Aunt Larisa?” I said. “You wouldn’t have anything to read here that would be in English?”

I had deliberately not brought along reading material, so that I would have to force myself to read in the language of my childhood. Every evening in bed I would pick up some book from the shelves in Larisa’s study and try to read a page or two before I fell off to sleep. It was a grueling exercise. The written language was fraught with delicate phrasings and traps of syntax I could barely navigate. After a week and a half I had actually gotten worse, for I’d begun to struggle against my own stupidity.

I followed Larisa into the study. Right before she’d broken her hip, she’d “redecorated” the apartment, which meant she’d pretty much taken everything extra—all her books and her collection of ceramic cats—and squeezed them into the tiny alcove where I now slept. With the couch folded out and my suitcase on the floor, there was almost no room for us both to move around. I sat down on the sofabed and watched Larisa explore the shelves for English reading material. I realized how much I loved that room and how much it summarized Larisa, with its gauzy white curtain and its outdated calendars of Chagall and Picasso, and the picture postcards of Édith Piaf and Frida Kahlo stuck in the glass panels of the bookcases.

“Here we are,” she said, pulling two small books out from behind some larger volumes. In her hands were the collected plays of Oscar Wilde, in hardcover, and a tattered paperback of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care.

“Oscar Wilde!” she said, looking as if she’d just rediscovered the book after twenty years.

“Can I see the other one?” I asked.

Curiously she looked at the Dr. Spock and handed it to me. When she closed the door behind her, I undressed and crawled under the sheets. I perused the extensive table of contents and opened to the first section of real interest: Discipline. I read: A child needs to feel that her mother and father, however agreeable, have their own rights, know how to be firm, won’t let her be unreasonable or rude. She likes them better this way. There was no reason to punish your children, Dr. Spock said, if you guided them along with a firm hand from the very beginning and didn’t let them wander into too much naughtiness. I read through a few more sections: Aggression, Duties, Jealousy, and Rivalry, which together added up to a cogent treatise on most of adult human behavior. Spock’s advice on diarrhea, motor skills, and fresh air seemed all to be aiming at one point: you can’t change another person’s character, though you can change their behavior.

Like a magnetized needle my mind turned again to Conrad: had I mismanaged him, allowed him to behave worse and worse, until now, when punishment was the only option? Except punishing someone always meant hurting yourself even more. I wondered at what moment things had turned. They seemed to have been going wrong from the beginning: that second afternoon in my apartment when we lay in bed, sweating under the tangle of the down comforter, Conrad had sat up against my oak headboard. “Tell me something you don’t like about me,” he said. “It can be something small.”

My right arm was pinned under him. I hauled myself up and gave him a stricken look.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll start. The way you plant your lips down, then move the rest of your face from side to side when you kiss me, like you’re kissing a toddler.”

He lifted the back of his hand, pressed it to his lips, and imitated me. He was right. I didn’t kiss like that all the time, but it was my signature move the moment the two of us were alone, my way of being tender. But I suppose there was a momminess, or an affected marital quality to it too, that annoyed him.

“Now it’s your turn,” he said.

I watched him, stunned. “I don’t want you to change anything,” I said, taking the high road.

“Of course you do.”

“I don’t want to play this game,” I said, and swung my legs over the side of the bed.

He was instructing me, I thought now. I had gotten it backward: I was the one being trained. There had been entire weeks in the office when we didn’t say a word to each other, when it seemed like all of it had ended for good. But then on some late night when a group of us would be out for happy hour on account of a birthday, and the crowd would be petering out at last, he’d walk up behind me and rest his fingers on my shoulders ever so gently. And it would all start over again.

The window was open, letting in the air from the cool night yard. I could smell the tart whiff of Larisa’s cigarette drifting in through the screen. She was smoking out on the balcony, getting in her last fix of calm before heading off to bed. The pain of my last encounter with Conrad didn’t seem quite so raw from the long reach of a new hemisphere. I was only a mind now, egoless and open, ready to see life as it was.

Larisa rapped lightly on my door. “I’m awake,” I said, and she peeked her head in. “I almost forgot to tell you, your mother called.”

I waited until I heard her go into her bedroom to join Misha, then got up and brought the yellow rotary phone, with its long wire, into my room. The dial was jammed again, and I finally got it unstuck with a firm finger hook.

“Hi, my love,” my mother said. “I thought you’d already gone to bed.”

“Guess what I’m reading?” I said. “Dr. Spock!”

“Oh, I adored that Dr. Spock. I followed his every syllable when you were little.”

“They sold his books here?”

“Of course. He was very fashionable. He was like…our first little window to the West. And then when we came to America, I remember someone told me he was running for president. It was so strange to me. I was even a little embarrassed for him because I didn’t understand why he’d run for an office he couldn’t win.”

“That’s what people do to advertise their cause,” I said, a little pedantically.

“I know that,” she said. “Now I do. That’s how much I didn’t know back then.”

I laughed quietly. It felt nice to hear her voice.

“I called you because somebody left a message for you from work.”

My chest tightened. “A man?” I said.

“I think so.”

“You can’t remember who called?”

“I didn’t listen closely, it was on your machine,” she said.

“You played my machine?”

“I just pressed the button when I came to water your plants. You had sixteen messages. Your box was full. I thought there were a few from me and I could just erase them to free up some space…”

“I can’t believe this.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There were quite a few from a Dan Sorgen.”

Dale Sorgen. Dale was one of the older accountants, the intractable salty dogs who could turn anyone into a school-girl with a few sharp words.

“He said he wanted to ask you some questions about an audit as soon as you got back.”

I’d stopped listening. The words were gathering into one heavy meaning, rocks in a lake. “Calm down,” I could hear Conrad saying. “You’re solid.” Except that now they were probably being forced to restate the quarter earnings, or else an investigation had been ordered by the SEC. A knot of tears was clogging my throat.

“Regina…,” my mother said.

I didn’t make a sound.

“Tell me,” she said. “Just tell me.”

“Mama, I’m sorry,” I said. I started crying. I told her what had happened. It seemed somehow easier to confess all these things knowing she was on the other side of the world.

“Oh, my darling,” she said finally. “Your day will come. But right now be smart. You confess, and then what—the millennium begins?”

Neither of us said anything for a minute. We just breathed on the phone, counting the wasted seconds of our precious long-distance time.

“So he was married?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Con-rad?” She spoke his name with a careful sort of amusement. “Sounds Polish.”

         

I slept in late. I was flying home in two days, and my body felt ready to revert to its old circadian rhythm. I took the phone back into the living room and tried to dial Nona at Dieter’s apartment. The rotary jammed. I scrolled it back to its old position and dialed again. No tone. I hung up the receiver and picked it up again. This time I could hear the chatter of another conversation on a cross line, but no drone. I’d promised to call Nona by noon. We’d planned to meet again this afternoon; her sister Ecca was taking the train in from Ivanovo to see me before I left. I picked up the phone again and cranked the numbers. It was dead.

“Aunt Larisa,” I called, knocking on her door. She came out, wearing her loose velour sweatpants and a blue promotional T-shirt my mother had included in her gifts.

“I think the phone is broken,” I said. “I really need to call my friend.”

Larisa walked over to the phone, where I’d put it on the coffee table, and sat down on the footrest beside it. She lifted the receiver, listened, shook it around, then listened again. She pressed her thumb on one of the plastic knobs of the dial and released it. “I told Misha to fix this,” she said. Then she slammed the phone on the table and lifted the yellow receiver to her ear again. No luck. She unplugged the tangled wire out of the jack and plugged it in again, wedging it in hard. She shook the receiver like a bottle of vinegar, as if that might dislodge debris that had tumbled in and was stopping the tone from coming out.

“Why don’t I go out and buy a new one?” I offered. I had no idea where I’d go around here to find a phone.

“He promised to fix it,” she said. “Everything. I have to do everything here myself.”

I stepped closer. “Maybe I can find a pay phone.”

“There are no pay phones around here!” she snapped. I flinched and stepped back. But just as quickly, as if she’d shocked her own system with her outburst, she pressed her forehead to the phone and began to cry.

“Alyosha would have fixed it,” she sobbed. Her face was hidden in her elbow.

I turned to look at the cat for its reaction. Mur was sitting on his hind paws and watching Larisa. Like me, he seemed to be awaiting a sign of reprieve. When the sound of Larisa’s breathing steadied, the cat got on his fours and moseyed over to her footstool. Then he threw his front paws up on Larisa’s knee and, digging his claws into her sweatpants, ripped two neat holes through the velour.

“Mur!” Larisa cried out in pain and disbelief. “Look what you did!” she yelled at the cat, but her eyes were all despair. And suddenly, spurred to action, she stood up and headed to the door. “I’ll get you a phone,” she said. I heard the door close behind her and then a slight creaking of the ceiling as she entered the apartment above us. I followed the sounds over my head and then the muffled, uneven shuffle of Larisa’s slippers as she traveled back down the stairs.

“We’ll be okay,” she said as she walked in carrying the neighbors’ black and white phone. Larisa was clutching it proudly as though it were a new top-of-the-line model. She ambled into the living room and plugged it in. When she picked up the receiver, a long clear tone rang out.

“Call your friend,” she said. “We have twenty minutes.”

“What happened?” Nona said. “I tried to call you.”

“Larisa’s telephone didn’t work.”

“She doesn’t have a cell?”

“A cell?” I said. “No.”

“The poor woman,” Nona said, not at all ironically.

Dieter was at the warehouse, she said, and Ecca was coming sometime in the later afternoon and going straight to Dieter’s apartment. She gave me the address. When I hung up, I saw that Larisa was sitting on the couch with a heavy photo album open on her lap, and another one resting beside her. I got up from the footstool and sat down next to her.

“Look at him,” she said, running her finger along the cardboard triangles of a photo frame. “So handsome. He looks just like your Teddy Kennedy, when he was younger.” She was right: I could see that Alexei shared a certain resemblance with the men of Hyannis Port. His face was a little doughy but still robust and a bit prankish.

She turned the page to a picture of her father. Larisa looked exactly like him. In the photo he was dressed in a uniform and wore the dignified, knowing expression of the civic-minded intellectual.

“I took care of him, right here,” Larisa said, and lifted her face up to look around the room. “He lived with me four months after his stroke. And that’s when I fell and fractured my hip. I had to stay at the hospital after my surgery, and that same week he died.” She looked at the photo and shook her head. I thought she might be crying, but when she raised her head, her eyes were dry. “I took care of him in his last days, and he died in somebody else’s arms. That’s my fate,” she said soberly. “Even my own Alyosha didn’t die in my arms.”

“In whose arms did he die?” I asked.

“She was the widow of one of his friends. He said he was in love with her, so what was I going to do? That’s how it happens. After nineteen years…not that it hadn’t happened in little ways before. He already had the cancer by then, but he didn’t know it yet. A year later he died in her apartment.”

I turned the cardboard page of the album and lifted away the acetate sheet. The two adjoining pages were pasted entirely with photographs of Larisa herself. There were pictures of a young, long-haired Larisa resting her chin in her palms and pouting at the camera. There were pictures of a bare-shouldered Larisa, coyly glancing upward, looking chaste even as she tried to look provocative; she had that brand of Slavic prettiness: broad-cheeked, benevolent, and rural.

“He loved to get me to pose for him. On Sundays he’d take out his camera, and we would stay home all afternoon just so he could take pictures of me.” On the opposite page was a somewhat older Larisa from the eighties, wearing more eyeliner, her wispy hair cut short and feathered.

“We weren’t like other couples. We were obsessed with each other. We were one of those couples who didn’t need anybody else. That was the kind of love we had.”

“But he left you,” I said.

Larisa only shrugged. “He called me his Turgenyevskaya jenshina, his Turgenev woman. I guess that’s what I am. In one lifetime I can love only one man. And my heart will always be given to him.”

She was talking about a dead man, I thought. The Turgenev woman! I wanted to tell her that such women probably didn’t even exist until Turgenev put them down on paper. But I knew that didn’t matter to her: they were as real now to Larisa as Turgenev’s lilacs and linden trees and fishponds. Single-mindedly devoted, they were women who, like Larisa herself, lived at a slower tempo than everybody else.

“And what about Misha?” I said instead.

“Well, it’s hard to be alone. He’s got his own children. I don’t know why he can’t let me into that part of his life. All I ever wanted was for us to do things together, like a family. You understand?”

I nodded. Larisa got up from the couch and walked over to open the balcony door, which the cat was scratching with its restless paw.

I could hear the front door unlocking.

“Hello, hello, who’s home?” Misha sang loudly, entering the living room. He looked at me, and then at the black and white phone. “A new phone?” he said.

“No.” Larisa turned around to stare at him. “We have to give this one back to Valentina Ivanovna. You never fixed our phone, and Regina needed it today.”

He looked at me, as if to confirm that this was true.

“I’ll fix it when I get back,” said Misha.

“Where are you going?” said Larisa, raising her brows.

“You know where I’m going. I told you I’ll be back in time to drive her to the airport.”

“I thought we were going to do something together this weekend.”

“Why?” he said, looking at me again. “Regina is here.”

“She has plans,” Larisa said bitterly. “She has friends to see.”

That was my cue to take off and leave them to work out their troubles by themselves. I closed the photo album and laid it softly on the couch. “I’ll go get dressed now.” I smiled at Larisa, then got up and went to my room.

I searched my suitcase for a clean shirt and listened to them on the other side of the door.

“They can’t get along without you for one weekend?” Larisa was demanding.

“I have to finish the roof.”

“Let me go with you. I can leave Regina a key.”

“And what are you going to do there? I’ll be laying shingles all weekend.”

“You always have a reason,” she said in protest. “You have it very comfortable here. Work is close, your shirts are ironed. And on weekends I’m all alone.”

“Is that what you think? I’m with you because it’s convenient?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think I want something from you?” I could hear the resonating tenor of Misha’s voice through the door. “Because if that’s what you think, we can end this right now.”

And then it quieted down. I couldn’t hear anything. Larisa was talking softly, trying to calm him. Or maybe they’d just become aware that they were within my range of hearing.

I pulled my hair up in a ponytail and spread a line of copper gloss on my lips. Then I gently turned the knob and walked out into the hall.

They’d stopped talking. “I’ll probably come back late,” I said. They stood in the middle of the room facing each other. Solemnly, both of them nodded, and I let myself out, closing the door behind me.

         

In the metro I was met by the usual ocean of dour faces. My God, I thought, these people have chandeliers in their subway. They have sculpted arches and mosaics. Their stations look better than the halls of some universities! Couldn’t they at least be delighted about that? It was as if everyone in Moscow was suffering from exactly the same toothache. And soon enough I’d be suffering from it, too.

There was a tall gate around Dieter’s apartment complex. The entire compound belonged to the German government and sat in an old section of Moscow. The streets were narrower; the high-rises had been replaced by rental houses of pale brick and pastel yellow. Even the sky seemed gentler here, a watercolor blue that turned coppery to the east.

Nona let me up. She unlocked the door and apologized for the clutter; she’d been moving her things in. The apartment was smaller than I’d expected—just one room and a fold-out cot right in the kitchen. It was a single man’s apartment, and I wondered how Nona would find room for herself in it. There was a drafting desk in the corner, supporting a computer and fax machine, and next to that was a framed photograph of two boys, about ten and twelve.

“Those are his sons,” said Nona, seeing me look at them. “That’s Florian, and that’s Thomas.”

“He’s divorced?”

“He’s getting divorced.” She dropped herself down on the couch. “I’ve got some more gifts for you,” she said.

“You gave me enough yesterday.”

She leaned over the side of the couch. “Those were from the company. These are from me personally.” She lifted a small glossy bag and set it on the glass coffee table.

I kneeled on the carpet and took out the items one by one. There was a basket with fancy soaps, a cat’s eye bracelet, and a bottle of apricot-colored perfume capped with a black tassel.

“This looks expensive,” I said.

“I get it cheaper because I sell it.”

I drew the perfume bottle close to my face and looked at the brand on the bottle. In tiny capitals the embossed glass letters read, AVON.

“You’re an Avon Lady?” I said.

“I’m taking a break. I have a group of girls from the medical school selling now. You ought to try it. I made more on this than I did working in the clinic.”

“I don’t know.” I smiled. I looked at her face and realized she was serious. I went back to studying my gifts. My conception of the Avon Lady was perhaps outmoded and a little kitschy. But I couldn’t help imagining the pastel-colored woman of Edward Scissorhands getting rejected at every door until she finds herself knocking on the Gothic mansion on the hill.

“I don’t think I have the time,” I said.

“It’s only a lot of work at first. Now I just sit back and collect commissions.”

“I think it works differently in America.” I put the perfume bottle on the table.

“Really?” Nona propped her hand on the armrest and, using her elbow for leverage, pushed herself up. “I thought it was the same model everywhere.” She got up from the couch and made a limping circle behind me, heading into the kitchen.

It was seven o’clock but still light. I got up and followed her.

“Where’s Ecca?” Nona said irritably. “Are you hungry? If she doesn’t show up in the next five minutes, I’ll have to start making something. I can’t live in hunger.”

She put a skillet on the stove and poured in some oil.

“So Dieter is getting divorced?” I said, taking a seat.

“They already know about me. Now it’s just a matter of time.” She moved the oil around on the pan. “He and his wife haven’t slept in the same bed in six years.” I thought about Conrad and how he liked to tell me that he and his wife hadn’t slept together in over a year. As if it made a bit of difference to me. I found it amusing that men who cheated on their wives were so insistent on saying they no longer slept with them. Maybe it was some kind of a last tribute to monogamy.

“How did you meet?” I said.

“The Internet. How else.”

“Were there others?”

“There was a man in Turkey,” Nona said. “Never married. I went to Istanbul for two weeks to see him. With him it was love. But he kept accusing me. He thought I had someone here. My philosophy is: he whose own ass is dirty always suspects others.”

“Love, huh?” I said. “And what about Dieter?”

“You know what my mother used to say about queens?”

“Queens?”

“Yes. A queen is not one who loves but the one who is loved.”

Nona opened the freezer and took out a piece of fish wrapped in plastic, then stuck her hand in a paper bag of flour and poured a fistful on the cutting board.

“What about you?” she asked, smiling. While she cut up the fish and rolled it in flour and laid it on the skillet, I told her about Conrad and the circumstances behind my “taking leave.”

“Ugh!” she said when I was finished. “Don’t you just wish you could kill people like that with your thoughts?” She seemed to draw no parallel between my story and her own with Dieter. We ate, and while I was washing the dishes, Ecca arrived, in a flurry of laughter and kisses and apologies. The three of us set out into town.

Ecca hadn’t changed much. She’d been a teenager when we’d left, and now she only looked more like herself, with deeper laugh lines. Next to Nona, Ecca was as skinny as a dancer. She looked like her father, with a cleft in her chin and a gap between her front teeth, but her eyes were bright and excitable, making her whole face incandescent with charisma.

Ecca said she was sorry she couldn’t stay overnight to see me off. Mashka, her six-year-old, was sick again because the kid kept sitting down on cold surfaces. “I told her if she keeps it up, she’ll freeze her ovaries.”

“We never got sick as kids,” said Nona. “That’s what was great about Georgia. All that citrus.”

We hailed a cab. Ecca sat down in the front seat while Nona and I took the back. We were driving along the city’s Garden Ring, and I still couldn’t find my seatbelt. There wasn’t even a trace of one; it seemed to have been ripped out at the root. “Don’t bother,” said Nona, watching me struggle. I looked at the driver. He wasn’t wearing his, either.

Ecca pulled her seatbelt to her left hip and held it down with her hand.

“Just leave it, Ecca,” said Nona.

“No. What if a police car drives by?”

“Ecca, this is ridiculous. If you’re going to hold the belt like that, why don’t you just buckle it up like a normal person?”

“Because I don’t want to.” She touched her chin to her chest and looked down at the seatbelt self-consciously. “It isn’t comfortable that way.”

“It’s more comfortable to keep your arm twisted?”

“Listen to you, bossy lady,” she said, facing us.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Nona said, turning to me. “Everything we do here is backward. We’ll break the law, even when it’s a million times easier just to follow it.”

Ecca looked down at her seatbelt again. “Maybe it wrinkles my shirt,” she said, not giving up.

On the radio a woman was talking about the eight hundred sixtieth anniversary of the city and the various renovations of its old churches. As the motto went, “The second was Constantinople, and Moscow is the third and final Rome. There will be no fourth.”

“Where are you from?” the cab driver said, lifting his eyes to look at me through the long rearview mirror.

“Me?” I said.

“Listen to that,” said Nona, aiming her chin at the radio. “What a dumb motto. ‘And there will be no fourth.’ Like this city is so worried someone might go off and build themselves a fourth Rome.”

“Yes, you,” said the driver. “You have…um, an accent.”

“Take a guess?” Ecca said.

“It’s a little hard to tell. Definitely not the West. Somewhere in the Baltic. Estonia?”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m from Estonia.”

Nona and Ecca exchanged looks. They were trying not to laugh.

“So how long you here?” said the driver.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I answered. “Back to Estonia.”

We rode a few blocks more. “You pretty women have a terrific night!” he said, before he dropped us off.

We walked down one of the side streets that separated Noviy Arbat from Old Arbat. The restaurant we were going to was called Déjà Vu, though it didn’t serve French food. We were going there to hear a singer Nona liked, an Armenian diva recently dumped from a famous rock group. A red brick staircase led up to a restaurant with a carved-out two-level ceiling, fashionably painted robin’s-egg blue. The band was tuning on stage, and the singer was welcoming everybody. She was dark haired and heavy and wore fist-sized turquoise jewelry on her neck and fingers.

I turned to Nona. “What does she sing?”

“Jazz,” she whispered.

I watched the singer blow a kiss at the guests sitting right in front of her. Jazz, it turned out, actually meant R&B covers of Beatles songs. I sliced my small steak and listened to music in a language that sounded vaguely like English.

“They slipper why they pass, they slipper why across the universe…,” sang the corpulent siren.

Nona had her eyes closed and was singing along with a few key words. I watched the pools of sorrow and waves of joy drifting through her open mind.

“Nothing going to change my wood…” crooned the singer.

I took a few sips of water, and in less than a moment the waitress was at my side, refilling my glass. The waitresses in this restaurant didn’t smile and didn’t bear any of the ambient friendliness I associated with waitstaff, but they were doing their job.

Nona’s eyes were still closed. Now the woman was singing about the many times she’d been alone and the many times she’d cried. But still they all led her back to the same “lawn and windy roar.”

Nona’s cell phone began buzzing in her bag, and her eyes snapped open.

“Da?” she said quietly. “Da. Hi, love.” She stood up from the table and headed in the direction of the restrooms.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” said Ecca. “I’ll put it out when she comes back.”

Now that Nona was gone, I wanted to figure out the pregnancy question. “Listen, Ecca,” I said, “I’m trying to understand the math here. She’s been seeing him for how long?”

“Six months.”

“And she’s six months pregnant?”

“Exactly. I struggle for two years, and she gets pregnant just by thinking about it. You know, I didn’t even agree to marry Sasha until I became pregnant. I wanted to make sure we would be able to.”

“But wait…”

“Yes, it’s his. She got herself pregnant the week they met. I mean, they’d been e-mailing.”

“But she didn’t even know him,” I said.

“She knew enough. Even if he does have all that gray hair and another family, he’s still better than our losers.”

“You don’t mind that she’ll move to Frankfurt?”

“I have a feeling that won’t happen for a while,” said Ecca. “Why would he go back now? All the money’s here.”

“She said, for the baby…”

“I’m sure he’s telling her that.” Ecca simulated a smile. “But listen, why do you think he’s with her instead of one of those tarts from his office? Nona’s got a motor in her ass. As soon as she moves all her stuff into his apartment, he’s going to hire her to work for him. Did she tell you that? He knows he’s getting ripped off by his partner. Dieter isn’t stupid. He wants his own person around, to look after his business while he’s back in Frankfurt with his wife and teenagers, building a second-story addition to their house, or whatever it is he goes back there to do.”

Ecca shot a glance toward Nona, who’d snapped shut her cell phone and with a determined, sour look was heading back to our table.

“Hi,” she said, planting herself down in the wicker chair. “Dieter says he’ll be late. He’ll try to come, but he probably won’t get here before eleven.”

Ecca put her cigarette out on the wet napkin. “It’s fine, Nona,” she said. “Forget about it. We’re having a good time, aren’t we?”

Nona closed her eyelids, breathed, then opened them again.

“What were you talking about?” she said.

“Our fertility,” said Ecca, and crumpled the napkin. “I was about to tell Regina about my adventures with tetracycline. My first gynecologist was this old woman, seventy years old,” she said, turning to me. “I got sick, and when I went to her, she told me I had a swollen fallopian tube, which was why I couldn’t get pregnant. So she put me on tetracycline. I was working two jobs, then I quit one and finally got some rest. Boom. Two months, and I was pregnant with Mashka. So I went back to this witch-lady to tell her, and she suddenly remembered that she’d put me on the tetracycline and told me I wasn’t supposed to try to get pregnant while I was on it. And I was probably carrying around a mutant now, so I’d better hurry up and get myself an abortion. For a whole week I cried, but I took my chances. And when Mashka was born, everything was in the right place. Five toes, five fingers.”

“Our medicine is in the dark ages,” Nona commented. “I practically have to bribe the nurses to sterilize my equipment.”

“It’s not that bad,” said Ecca.

“The only thing we’ve ever known how to do here,” Nona continued, ignoring her, “is measure each other’s blood pressure. Remember that, when our parents threw those parties, after dessert somebody would always pull out the old pump-and-armband.”

“And everybody took turns strapping it on,” laughed Ecca.

I did remember. It had been like a sexy parlor game our parents had played, an excuse to have an intimate moment with somebody else’s spouse.

Ecca laughed again and then returned to her own story. “When Sasha and I were still trying to have a baby,” she said wistfully, “he’d always ask me, ‘Katya, will you still marry me even if you can’t get pregnant right now?’” She glanced up at the light blue ceiling and sighed.

Nona rolled her eyes, as if to say how romantic.

“Katya?” I said. “Your husband calls you Katya?”

“Katya, short for Ekaterina,” said Ecca, shrugging it off.

“Nobody knows her as Ecca anymore,” Nona said, smiling. “Only I still call you that.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Nona.

The table behind us was making a lot of noise, laughing at their own jokes. We turned around to look. There were several men, a few with longish hair and monochromatic silk ties. The women, who seemed even more gregarious, were wearing heavy French makeup and had the kind of classic Eastern European faces that straddled the line between trash and exquisite beauty.

“Look at them,” said Nona. “Drown me if I ever start to dress like a new Russian.”

“Isn’t that what you are?” I said. “You’re rich.”

“I’m not Russian.”

“You are,” said Ecca, offended. “We’re half.”

“Well, I’m not changing my name,” said Nona.

“I didn’t change my name. And if you’re such a big patriot, why don’t you move back to Georgia?”

“I don’t need to move back there,” Nona said, looking straight at her. “I’m moving to Frankfurt.” They seemed to have forgotten I was there, but I didn’t stop them. In their sisterly way they were probably enjoying their bickering.

“We’ll see,” said Ecca, turning back toward the singer.

Nona’s cell phone rang again, and once more she got up and headed for the restrooms.

“She’s just being pregnant,” said Ecca. “She loves to start these fights. I just go along with it because a good fight can be very fortifying. But sometimes I’m ready to kill her.”

Dieter didn’t join us that night. Nona and I rode with Ecca to the station and put her on the night train. It had started to rain, and in the damp street the gypsy-cab drivers beckoned us, but Nona, stepping off the sidewalk to inspect each one, in the end refused all of them for shortcomings she didn’t give a reason for. We ended up taking the metro, and in the dry roaring silence of the car, we sat side by side staring at the blackened windows.

We were tired, or rather Nona was tired. My head was glowing from the glass of white wine at the restaurant. It looked like Nona was still upset about Dieter not showing up, but she didn’t say anything about it.

“So you’ll be packing tonight?” she said.

My plane didn’t leave until six the next evening, I told her. I needed to be at the airport by three. Tonight I would just crawl into bed and read my Dr. Spock. “It’s funny,” I said. “I found an old copy in Larisa’s apartment, in English.”

“Does she have children?” Nona asked.

“No. But it turns out my mother read him.”

“Hmm,” Nona said. “Your mom was a real book mom. Ours was a folk mom. She was of that school of parenting that taught you to smack your kid’s head once in a while with the side of a shoe.”

We laughed and got quiet again. Perhaps it was the wine, or the nearly empty train car, but I felt scared for her all of a sudden. Her short hair was wet from the rain and stuck to her forehead as if she were a wet cat. Her lips were purple. She looked like she hadn’t slept in a long time.

“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” I said.

“I think it’s a little too late for that,” she said, turning to me. And I realized I had been fixing my eyes on her stomach.

“That isn’t what I’m talking about,” I said. “Ecca told me you’re going to work for him. Doing what: answering the phone?”

“Tell me what clinic is going to hire me in this city when they know I’ll work for three months, then take off for maternity leave?”

“Maternity leave doesn’t last forever,” I said. “You’ve been training to be a doctor for six years.”

“So what?”

“So you’re just going to give that up?”

“I’d rather work for Dieter, and then we’ll be living in Frankfurt.”

“And what if it doesn’t work out between you?” I said. “Then what? What if his business fails? Medicine changes, you’ll lose your skills.”

“Fails?” She looked at me like I was crazy. “We’ll be selling stockings in every kiosk in this metro! And if that fails, we’ll start another one.”

“Or he’ll go home!” I said. “You aren’t even married.”

Nona shook her head in disbelief.

“You. You are just so sure it won’t work out.”

“You don’t know each other very well,” I said calmly. “If I’m not wrong, he has another family.”

She stared at me in amazement. “Do you have any idea what you’re talking about? You’ve had one ridiculous affair, and you think you’re the voice of experience?”

I didn’t feel like talking about this anymore. I looked at the woman sitting on the bench across from us. She was about forty, wearing the same upward-pointing shoes all the young people wore. They’re all a big herd, I thought. Young and old. I was tired of looking at their grim, unfriendly faces. What was wrong with these people, with this whole city, where an ordinary smile was considered a sign of weakness?

“He won’t leave me out on the street,” Nona said flatly when we arrived at my station. We didn’t kiss or hug. I walked off the train, and she stayed.

         

When I came home, Larisa was still up. I could see the light on in the kitchen through the wavy glass door. It was one o’clock in the morning.

“Long night,” I said, walking in. Larisa was sitting at the table smoking a cigarette, with a plate of cottage cheese and a porcelain sugar bowl in front of her.

“Is Misha here?”

She shook her head. “He’s at Saltykovka, with his family.”

“You didn’t have to stay up for me.”

“It’s okay. I couldn’t sleep. How are your friends?”

“They’re good. We talked,” I said, pulling one arm out of the sleeve of my jacket, “about our fertility.”

Larisa twisted her lips into a half smile and raised her eyebrows, which were almost invisible without the brown pencil lines.

“If you get more than two women in one room,” I said, “the talk invariably turns to fertility.”

“Are you done reading Dr. Spock?” she said, tapping out her cigarette.

“I don’t think I’ll read him tonight. Too much reassuring common sense for me.”

“I saw you underlined some of it.”

“I did? I mean, you looked inside?”

“I was just cleaning up. I was going to put all the books away,” she said, then paused. “Unless you want to take it back with you?”

“Aunt Larisa,” I said. “Do you mind if I ask, why do you have it? Why in English?”

She looked past me at the refrigerator. She seemed to be thinking about it. “I wanted to improve my English when I was twenty-eight. I thought I could practice reading it and at the same time…” She stopped.

“You were planning to have a child?” I said.

She nodded. “It turned out I had cysts in one of my ovaries, though. I’d had these pains for a while, but they never got diagnosed. One night I was in so much pain, Alyosha took me to the hospital. It turned out a cyst had gotten infected. So that night they did surgery to remove it, along with the ovary. And while I was under anesthesia, they cut out the other ovary too, as a preventive measure, they later said. In the morning the head of the ward came to see me. He hadn’t been on call when they’d operated on me. He looked at my chart and said, ‘Young woman, have you already had a child?’ And then he gave me the news. That’s our country,” she said. “Slice it off now, ask questions later.”

I gazed at her in disbelief, and she stared back without expression.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“It’s different when you have children. Who knows how things would have turned out between Alyosha and me if we’d had a child? Two people can’t live their entire lives just being obsessed with each other.” She folded her arms on the table. “Or even now,” she said. “If I had someone now, instead of just Misha.”

I got out of my chair and walked over to her. While I held her, she pressed her head into the small of my shoulder. Her neck was soft the way skin gets when it becomes a little loose. I could smell her sweetness through the tobacco, and the last notes of the soapy perfume she kept on the sink. How many ways a person can be lonely, I thought.

         

I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept closing my eyes to ease the headache between them and jerking awake again. Sleep! I demanded. Then I calmed myself by saying I would sleep on the plane. But the prospect of spending eleven hours elevated in the air, feeding on pudding, made me sick. My window was open and I concentrated on the fans of sound passing: distant voices being carried in the outdoor night, the long whooshes of cars brushing blacktop. Everything, divided by silences. I felt the hard cushions of the couch under my back, a seam where the sofa unfolded digging into the knobs of my spine. I was the Princess on the Pea. Nothing felt comfortable. I pulled the pillow from under my neck and stuffed it between my knees. Why had I opened my mouth? Here I’d come, from the wise end of the planet to offer Nona my Important Opinion.

I lay on my back. The walls were draped in gray. The bookshelves and desk were opaque shapes between murky rectangles of half-light. My mind, manic with thought, was now a warped door that wouldn’t close. You can’t demand so much of people and yet expect so little of them, it kept telling me. For the first time I contemplated the lace designs on Larisa’s transparent curtains: there was a border of round flowers, and butterflies swimming above them. The fabric creases were projected onto the ceiling. Sweet Larisa, who lived in the world of her love. It didn’t matter to her that her husband had left her. Or that he was dead now. She had loved him and she was still proud of that love. I remembered all the times in my life I had begun to fall in love, had fallen in love, and then told myself I had been wrong. Because people, when you got down to it, always ended up being so disappointing. Sooner or later you discovered something about them that would make you ashamed of what you had felt for them. Or they made things simple by not loving you back. Love unreturned wasn’t really love; it was obsession, vulgar and misguided. Except that for Larisa, the reality of what had happened to her hadn’t thrown all her old feelings into question. It had not caused her to disown them. Foolish, naïve, embarrassing, they were hers and she would die with them. Really, it was a kind of freedom, I thought.

I heard a faint scratching at the bottom of my door. It was Mur, who must have gotten locked out of Larisa’s room. In the dark I got up and turned the handle. The door pushed a crack and I caught his small black shadow dip into the room and disappear. I crawled back under the covers and, after a little pull-and-tug, felt a lump of fur-covered fat arranging itself on the top of my cold feet. I thought of a hen squatting on its nest. I pulled my toes out from under him and the lump squeezed itself beneath the arches of my feet. And then I fell asleep.

I woke up with the sun shining spots on the curtains. It was noon. Misha was arriving at two to take me to the airport.

“Your friend has been calling all morning,” Larisa said as soon as I stepped into the hallway. “I didn’t want to wake you up. You looked so peaceful. Anyway, I already talked to her. She feels terrible about last night. Did you two have a fight?”

I opened my mouth, but Larisa didn’t wait for me to answer. “She wanted to see you before you left, so I invited her here for tea.”

“When?” I asked, my mouth still cottony.

“She called half an hour ago.” There was a rag in Larisa’s hand. She was tidying up the apartment.

“Go! Quickly,” she ordered. “Take a shower. Pack your things.”

I watched her turn and shoo Mur into her room. Cats and pregnant women didn’t mix. “I’m sorry, Mur, we are having an important guest,” she lectured. “You’ll have to be alone for a while.” And then she locked him in the bedroom.

I was getting out of the shower when I heard the door unlatch. I toweled off, dressed, and went into the living room.

“I’m sorry,” Nona said, standing up from the couch. “I’m sorry for how I was behaving last night. I didn’t want you to leave and…”

She was wearing a long dress and had her short hair up in a headband.

“No, don’t be,” I said, embarrassed. “I should be.” She came up to me and we stood there, trying to smile with our lips turned down.

“Are you packed?” said Larisa, walking in.

I shook my head.

“Go, fast. Misha is coming soon!”

I kept my door open so I could hear them talking. Larisa led Nona into the kitchen. “How many months do you have left?” she asked.

Three, Nona told her.

She told Nona she looked wonderful, not even a little dark spot on her complexion. Did she know the gender?

“A boy,” said Nona, feigning disappointment. “What can you do?”

“A boy! But that’s wonderful,” said Larisa. “A boy is a mother’s defender!” She was playing her part, the cheerful supporter, and if Nona had told her she was carrying a girl, Larisa would have said, “How lovely! A girl is a mother’s companion!”

“Have you thought about names?” Larisa was indulging her with all the questions pregnant women loved to get asked. Had she felt the baby kicking already? Was she planning to nurse? Nona was answering them all with delight. And so it went, that age-old duet of women. How had I not thought to ask these questions? I wondered. I had looked at her body and had seen nothing but another weight she was carrying. But having this baby wasn’t something Nona was forcing herself to do out of necessity or circumstances. She was thirty-one and she wanted a child.

My suitcase was now heavy with all the stuff Nona had given me, creams and socks and massagers. I hoisted it on its side and dragged it out into the hallway.

“When you’re all done moving,” Larisa was saying, “if you need anything at all, you call here.”

I entered the kitchen, drawn by an odor other than cigarettes. Larisa was actually brewing tea. She had placed the porcelain teapot in the middle of the table on a small wooden cutting board and covered it with a dish towel to keep the heat from escaping while the tea steeped.

“Sit down,” she said, looking at me. “Stop moving around. Before a journey you always have to sit in silence.” She’d pulled out her podstokaniki, the silver-plated filigree glass holders, beautiful things engraved with trelliswork. When she poured in the tea, the clear glass steamed up but the metal handles stayed cool. “Okay,” she said. “Now we’ll sit.” And that’s what we did, we sat, waiting for Misha to arrive and for our drinks to cool, so we could inhale them in the warm afternoon.