The Fount of Happiness (Источник счастья)
by Polina Dashkova
Click here to read the author's biography
Click here to read a synopsis
***
Sample translation by Andrew Bromfield
“Clearly before he died the old man had been seeking the philosopher’s stone… the rogue!
And he had managed to keep it a secret!”
V.F. Odoevsky, “The Sylph”
Chapter One: Moscow 1916
Professor Mikhail Vladimirovich Sveshnikov’s apartment occupied the fourth floor in a new building on Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street. The professor was a widower, although he was not old, and he had three children – malicious gossips claimed he had grown them all in test-tubes. Among the local market women rumours were also rife that this doctor raised people from the dead, could turn into a black cat or a white mouse, and had lived for two thousand years. His membership of the Russian nobility and title of professor had supposedly been obtained by means of black magic, with additional help from the secret services of Japan and Germany.
However, Professor Sveshnikov himself knew nothing about all these rumours, and neither did the members of his family and household. Apart, that is, from the maid Marina, a plump, quiet girl of about twenty-five: sometimes, after a visit to the grocery stall, she tried to share the market women’s stories with the old nanny Avdotya Borisovna, who was almost completely deaf. As Marina whispered loudly in her ear, Avdotya Borisovna sighed, gasped and shook her head. She thought Marina was talking about some fictitious characters or other, someone from the newspapers or out of books. She could never, even for a moment, have imagined that Marina meant her own beloved Mishenka, the little boy she had nursed at her breast in a different century.
Moscow was teeming with mediums, prophets, hypnotists, palm readers, sorcerers – something to suit every possible taste, in fact. The spiritualist Bublikov, who lived in the same building, in the apartment just above the professor’s, even had a shiny plaque on his door that read: “A.A. Bublikov, Doctor of Esoteric Learning, Grand Magician, Honoured Spiritualist of the Russian Empire”. But for some reason the market women found him far less interesting than Professor Sveshnikov.
Sometime between six and seven o’clock on a dark January morning in 1916, a woman’s desperate shriek rang out from a fourth floor window overlooking the courtyard of the house. The yard keeper Suleiman thrust his shovel into a snowdrift and looked up. The small upper section of the window was open and bright electric light shone through the gap in the heavy curtains, lying in a stripe across the dark heap of snow and setting the individual snowflakes in it sparkling like a scattered deposit of small diamonds.
After the shriek there were no more sounds, just silence. The yard keeper took off his mittens and prayed quietly and scrupulously to Allah.
In the former dining room, which had been converted into a laboratory, the old housemaid Klavdia was sitting on the floor, sniffing smelling salts. Leaning down over her was Professor Sveshnikov, still sleepy and unshaven, in his quilted silk dressing gown and with a towel round his neck. He had come darting out of the bathroom at the sound of the maid’s scream.
“Come on, Klava, easy now, stop trembling like that,” the professor told her in his pleasant baritone voice, still slightly husky after a night’s sleep. “Calm down and tell me exactly what happened.”
Klavdia sniffed, raised a trembling hand and pointed to the far corner, behind the oilcloth hospital curtain, where there were three small, glass-walled boxes with close-spaced holes in them for air. Two fat white rats were dashing around and cheeping soundlessly in the first. A dozen little baby rats were swarming about in the second. The third was empty.
“Did you open the cage?”
Klavdia shook her head in emphatic denial. The professor took her under the arms, lifted her up, led her over to the couch and sat her down, then strode resolutely towards the rats’ corner.
The thick, sturdy glass was cracked in several places. The round metal cover had been flung open. Some of the fine pinewood shavings that covered the bottom of the box were lying on the floor around it.
“Did you see him?” the professor asked, examining the fresh scratches on the metal and the small broken latch.
“Of course I saw him! He jumped at me, and where would he get the strength for that, him being so old and sick? At death’s door already, and he jumped right up this high.” Klavdia indicated a height of about five feet from the floor. “Almost got his teeth into my face, the bastard did, I had to beat the little shit off with the broom.”
The housemaid Klavdia was a god-fearing woman, taciturn and demure. She never jabbered or raised her voice or used swearwords. But now her cheeks were burning and her eyes were glittering, she was trembling as if she had a fever and licking her dry lips. Following his old doctor’s habit, Professor Sveshnikov pressed his fingers against her wrist and noted perfunctorily that her pulse was racing at a frantic pace, at least a hundred and fifty a minute, and his own pulse was just as fast.
“Hang on now, are you telling me that he fell from somewhere?” the professor asked, looking round.
“Of course he didn’t fall. No!”
“Well what then? Did he jump straight up off the floor? To that kind of height?” The professor laughed nervously.
“He flew up, like he was a bird, not a rat. Ai-ai, little father, what’s going on?” Klavdia wailed. Her mouth dropped open and her eyes stared wildly.
Everything went quiet. In the silence they could hear the rustling of the yard keeper’s shovel as he cleared the snow outside. And then that sound was joined by another – a persistent, alarming scraping.
The brown plush curtain twitched rapidly and violently, as if it had come to life. There was a crack, and the end of the massive wooden curtain rod started creeping down the wall. Plaster came showering down.
The professor came to his senses first. He bounded across to the window and pounced on the frisky curtain.
“Klava, the ether, quickly! And gloves, put on gloves!”
Professor Sveshnikov went down on his knees, with the captured curtain squeaking and jerking about in his hands. He was panting heavily and snorting through his nose, his eyes glinted brightly and his cheeks glowed pink under their grey stubble. He looked like a goalkeeper who has caught the ball at the crucial moment, just in time to save the match.
“No!” Klava shouted in a whisper. “I can’t! As God’s my witness, Professor. I can’t. Did you see his face? Did you see his eyes?”
“Stop that, it’s nothing but a rat. Put the gloves on.”
The curtain rod swayed above the professor, barely holding on a single screw, and the copper ball on the end of the rod threatened to come crashing down straight onto his head. Klavdia sat there motionless, except for her lips, which moved slightly as she murmured a prayer.
“All right then. Go and wake Tanya,” said the professor.
The maid jumped up and darted out into the corridor. Just outside the door she ran into a young lady of seventeen – Professor Sveshnikov’s daughter, Tanya. The thin, blue-eyed girl had already been woken by the noise and she was hurrying to the laboratory to help her father, with her fair hair hanging loose down to her waist over her yellow dressing-gown.
A quarter of an hour later the fat little beast lay stretched out, etherized, on the small operating table. It was completely white, except for a ginger spot under the lower jaw. This strange mark, a rather unlikely one for a rat, had a quite well-defined shape: it was a five-pointed star – an inverted pentagram.
“This rat’s great-great-grandmother must have had an adulterous affair with some ancestor of nanny’s cat,” Tanya had once remarked. “That handsome Murzik has a mark in exactly the same place, although his is round.”
“Out of the question,” the professor had retorted. “Such relations are not possible between cats and rats.”
Tanya had laughed until she got the hiccups. She was always terribly amused by the expression on her father’s face at those moments of intense concentration when he stopped understanding jokes and considered even the most absurd conjectures seriously.
“Let’s call him Grishka, after Grigorii Rasputin,” Tanya had suggested, touching the ginger pentagram with her finger.
“How many times do I have to tell you that you must never give experimental animals names, only numbers,” her father had said with a frown. “And why bring Her Majesty’s mystical peasant into it? He’s not the only person in the world called Grigorii. Mendel, the founder of genetics, was a Grigorii too.”
“All the better! I’m going to call him Grishka the Third!” Tanya had exclaimed merrily.
“Don’t you dare! At least, not in my presence!” her father had replied angrily.
That dialogue had taken place about a year earlier. Ever since then Tanya had always called the experimental rat with the ginger spot Grishka the Third. And without even realising, Professor Sveshnikov had started using that name for him too.
But now both of them, father and daughter, gazed at the small sleeping beast in bewilderment. Its naked pink belly was trembling slightly. Its paws, like elegant, miniature lady’s hands, made a few feeble scraping movements and then lay still.
“No, papa, of course it’s not Grishka,” Tanya said with yawn. “Look, its fur’s all white and fluffy, its eyes are pink. Its skin’s soft and young. Grishka went almost completely bald after the operation.”
“He went bald, but now he’s grown his fur back.”
“As quickly as that?”
“In a month. That’s normal.”
“And the colouring of the new fur is exactly the same as the old? With the same pentagram on the throat?”
“As you can see.”
“Grishka should have a scar on his skull. Where is it? There isn’t any scar.”
Tanya’s hand in the black medical glove carefully turned the rat over onto its belly. The professor took a large magnifying glass and parted the thick, glossy fur above the rat’s shoulders.
“There’s the scar. It’s very small.”
“Papa, stop!” Tanya said with a shake of her head. “The wound couldn’t have healed up so quickly, and the fur couldn’t have grown either. You’re not an alchemist or a medieval magician or Doctor Faustus! You know perfectly well that this is all stupid nonsense. People will laugh at you. A twenty-seven-month old rat can’t look like that, it just can’t! Twenty-seven months for a rat is like ninety years for a human being.”
“Hey, hang on now, why are you shouting like that? What are you so frightened of, Tanechka?” the professor asked, stroking his daughter on the neck. “An old rat has grown new, young fur. His eyes have gone pink. These things happen.”
“Do they?” Tanya shouted, pulling off her gloves and tossing them into the corner. “Papa, I think you’ve gone insane! You told me yourself that the biological clock never runs backward.”
“Don’t shout. Help me take a sample of his blood for analysis while he’s still asleep and think how we can reinforce the lid of the cage so that he won’t get out again.”
Professor Sveshnikov was already holding a steel pen-nib and a clean test tube in his hands. Tanya quickly twisted the long hair that was getting in her way into a tight knot, tied a headscarf low across her forehead to hold it back and put on a clean pair of gloves. But all the time she carried on talking in a loud, nervous voice.
“He was born on August 1, 1914, a date that’s impossible to forget. That was when the war started. He was the only member of the litter to survive. Frail but aggressive.”
“Precisely, aggressive,” her father muttered, peering happily through his half-closed eyes.
A drop of the rat’s blood slithered down into the narrow test tube. Tanya picked up the sleepy creature and, as she carried him back to his box, she could feel the warmth and gentle throbbing of his body through her gloves. For a moment she had the feeling that what she was holding in her hands was not a laboratory animal, like all the many others she had seen since she was a child, but a creature of some strange, unearthly species. She cast a sideways glance at her father, crouched over his microscope. The pink skin showed through his short-trimmed grey hair. Grishka started moving his paws: the ether was wearing off. Tanya put the rat in the box, on the pinewood shavings, and weighted the lid down with the heavy marble base of an inkstand.
“Are you going to anatomise him?” she asked as she took off the gloves and the headscarf.
She had to repeat the question in a louder voice. Her father was glued to the microscope.
“Eh? No, I’ll observe him for a bit longer. Go and tell them to put the samovar on. Well, don’t just stand there! Go on, you’ll be late for school.”
“Papa!”
“What, Tanya?”
“Tell me, did you manage to isolate that protein?”
“I don’t know. It’s not very likely.”
“Then why?”
Professor Sveshnikov finally raised his head from the microscope and looked at his daughter.
“It’s all quite simple, Tanechka. He’s been on a strict diet and he’s very active. His cage is closer to the window than the others, and the small window’s open, he’s been breathing fresh air.”
“Papa, stop it! You follow a diet too, and you breathe fresh air!”
The professor didn’t answer. He was glued to the microscope again. Tanya walked out of the laboratory and closed the door quietly.
Moscow, 2006
The doorbell trilled in the hall. The cell phone warbled like a nightingale on the bedside table, informing her that she had a message. The first thing Sonya saw when she woke up was her father, sitting on the edge of the bed with one finger pressed to his lips, shaking his head.
“Don’t open the door,” he whispered, “don’t open it, whatever you do.”
Sonya got up, put her dressing gown on over her pyjamas and shuffled out, barefoot, into the hallway. Her father stayed where he was and didn’t say anything else, just watched her go with a sad, childish look in his eyes.
“Sophia Dmitrievna Lukyanova?” a man’s voice asked outside the door.
“Yes,” Sonya said hoarsely and started coughing.
“Open the door, please. You have a delivery.”
“Who from?”
There was a dry rustling sound on the other side of the door.
“Read the message on your cell phone. It arrived twenty minutes ago,” said the expressionless male voice.
On her way back to the room to get the phone, Sonya glanced in the mirror. Her mother’s shabby old dressing gown dangled loosely on her skinny shoulders, like a sack on a scarecrow in a vegetable garden. The bandage had slipped down off her ear onto her neck during the night, her hair was disgustingly matted and there were tufts of cotton wool tangled in it. Her right ear was red and swollen from the medical spirit compresses, and the skin was flaking off. From the chilly way she was shivering, her morning temperature must be over a hundred. She still had stabbing pains and gurgling sounds in her ear and the entire right side of her head ached.
“Dear Sophia Dmitrievna, Happy Birthday to you! With very best wishes for good health and every success in your work! I.Z.”
That was the last message, and it had arrived just twenty minutes ago, at half past ten. There were three others that had come earlier. Sonya slammed her phone shut without bothering to read them and plodded back into the hallway.
“Don’t open the door,” her father whispered again.
He was standing beside her now. His cheeks had a bit more colour in them. The delicate grey fluff on the top on his head was fluttering. His eyes seemed bigger and brighter.
There was no sound on the other side of the door.
“Hey, are you still there?” Sonya asked.
No answer.
“I think they’ve gone,” Sonya told her father. “I’ll open up anyway, just to take a look, all right?”
Her father started shaking his head fearfully.
The fever, the pain and the continuous crackle of gunfire in her ear meant that she saw everything through a blurred haze, as if the air in the small apartment had thickened and congealed.
“What are you so afraid of?” Sonya asked. “You just had a bad dream, that’s all.”
“No,” said her father, “it’s not a dream. It’s all real, Sonechka. Please don’t open the door.”
“Not ever?”
“I don’t know. But you certainly shouldn’t open it now.”
They stood there for a few seconds, looking at each other without speaking.
“All right. It makes no difference to me. I’m going to lie down,” said Sonya. “Do you remember where our thermometer is?”
Her father took a step towards her and touched her forehead with his lips.
“A hundred point seven. You broke the thermometer last night. Please don’t forget to sweep up the mercury from under the bed. You know how harmful it is.”
“All right, but where’s the brush?”
“In the car. You brushed the snow off the car and left it in the trunk. And we don’t have another one. But don’t you even think of going to get it. There’s a blizzard out there, it’s really cold. You can gather up the mercury with a damp rag. I’d do it myself, only …”
In the room the cell phone started warbling like a nightingale again, announcing another message. Someone rang the doorbell again, this time so stridently that Sonya started.
“Sophie, are you home? Are you sleeping, or what?”
It was a voice she couldn’t fail to recognise. A rumbling, gritty bass heard almost every day in TV voice-overs on a certain private channel that was not very popular. The image on the screen usually advertised electronic devices with radiation emitters for treating sinusitis, obesity and inflammation of the prostate gland, or female healers with blazing eyes who could neutralize hexes and return straying husbands to their wives, or little devices for removing hair where it wasn’t wanted and making it grow where it was. Her father put that channel on especially in order to hear Nolly, a heavy drinker, advertising tablets for curing alcoholism in his deep, authoritative bass voice; in order to hear Nolly, who was obese, telling people about the latest methods of instantaneous weight-loss.
Nolly’s own straying wife had left him a year ago, but he hadn’t turned to the enchantresses for help, instead of that he’d taken to spending evening after evening loitering in the Lukyanovs’ kitchen, moaning that his life was over.
“Sophie, it’s me! Open up!”
Nolly’s deep voice sounded lively and cheerful. Things must be really bad, thought Sonya. He never used to drink in the mornings. It took her a few minutes of fiddling to manage the locks. Her father stood beside her, tense and silent. Eventually the door opened.
“Miaow, miaow!” said Nolly.
His round face was glowing brightly. He always miaowed when he’d been drinking. But Sonya’s nostrils weren’t assaulted by the odour of stale-alcohol breath, instead they were swamped by the scent of live flowers. Nolly had a huge bouquet of roses under his arm. The tight buds – dark-crimson, almost black – were covered in fine droplets of water.
“Happy birthday!” He stepped in through the door and reached out for Sonya’s cheek with his lips.
“Have you lost your mind?” Sonya asked, wincing at another burst of machine-gun fire in her ear.
“Unfortunately, my innate honesty will not allow me to lie,” Nolly sighed, jutting out his lower lip, “they’re not from me. They were lying on the doormat. I just heard someone go down in the lift. You can take a look out the kitchen window, if you’re quick enough maybe you’ll see who it was.”
“The brush …” Sonya began and choked on another fit of coughing.
“A brush? These are high-class roses! For goodness’ sake, Sophie!” Nolly protested. “They’re incredibly beautiful, just look at them, smell them! You absolutely must trim the stems and singe the ends.”
“The brush is in the car, the keys are in the pocket of my blue jacket, go down and get the brush, please. It’s in the trunk. I broke the thermometer and I have to sweep up the mercury.”
“Ah, now I get you,” Nolly said with a nod. “I’ll go right now. Only don’t throw the roses out, put them in water.”
The door closed behind him. Sonya was left standing there, with her arms wrapped round the rustling bouquet. She didn’t have a large vase at home, the only vessel big enough to hold the flowers was the plastic trash bucket. Sonya tugged out the bag of trash, rinsed the bucket and filled it with water. While she was fiddling with the flowers, Nolly came back. In addition to the brush he brought a small brown briefcase, which he solemnly presented to Sonya.
“Do you remember what my mother always says when the things you need go missing? ‘It’s lying low somewhere, keeping stum.’ Here you are, it was lying under the front passenger seat and, of course, it was keeping stum. But even if it could have said anything, nobody would have been likely to hear it.”It was her father’s briefcase. The one that had disappeared on that terrible evening, nine days ago.
“Dad!” Sonya called. “Come here and look, Nolly’s found your precious purse.”
“Don’t shout,” her father whispered. “I can hear you perfectly well. I’m right here.”
And there he was, right in front of Sonya. In just a few minutes his face had turned haggard and old, his cheeks were pale and wrinkled, covered with old man’s stubble, and the grey fluff on his head was flattened down, plastered against the skin. His eyes had turned dim and they looked so hopeless that Sonya felt a shudder run through her.
“Aren’t you even a bit pleased that your briefcase has turned up?” she asked quietly.
Her father shook his head mournfully and put his hands on her shoulders. The hands were too heavy and warm. Sonya squeezed her eyes tight shut, trying to stop her head spinning, and when she opened them, she saw Nolly’s frightened face and felt his huge mitts resting on her.
“Sophie, look at me! It’s me, Sophie! Can you see me at all? Can you hear me? What’s that rope round your neck?”
“You fool! It’s not a rope, it’s a bandage. I’ve got an ear infection, Nolly, I put a compress on overnight, and it slipped off. I can see you and hear you perfectly well. What’s wrong?”
“You were just talking to your father.”
“Yes. So what?”
Nolly pressed his hand against her forehead.
“You’re feverish. But not feverish enough to be delirious. Please, come to your senses.”
Poor Nolly was so frightened that his mild morning inebriation had evaporated without a trace. So Sonya came to her senses, for Nolly’s sake, so that he would stop worrying.
“Everything’s fine. I’m all right. I know dad died, we buried him last Wednesday and today’s the ninth day.”
“Phew, thank God for that,” Nolly sighed, “only you forgot to add that today also happens to be your birthday. You’re thirty years old now, Sophie. There are thirty-one roses here. Someone put in an extra one, because an even number of flowers in a bouquet is bad luck. Only a free spirit like you could put roses in the trash bucket. Did you at least pour some water in?”
“Naturally! Arnold, why didn’t you give me a big, beautiful vase for my birthday?”
“I’ve got a different present for you. But you won’t get it, Onion, if you keep calling me Arnold. If I hear that name one more time, I’m leaving.”
“Aha! Your feet won’t touch the ground on the way out if you dare call me Onion again!”
They glared at other for a second, as if they were squaring up for a fight. Nolly was panting indignantly. Twenty years earlier they definitely would have had a fight, and it would have been hurtful, if not physically painful. Nolly simply couldn’t stand his full name, Arnold. And Sonya’s childhood nickname, Onion, always annoyed her. It immediately summoned up memories of a school corridor with glossy green paint on the walls and grey parquet-pattern lino on the floor, the sound of tramping feet behind her and cries of: “Luka’s got a bunion, smells like an onion! Onion!”
Nolly used to go to the same school, he was two grades ahead of her, he lived in the apartment opposite hers, and it was his fault that they used to chase after Sonya and call her Onion. Nina Markova, the most forward girl in Sonya’s class, had a crush on him. She used to write him notes and she insisted that Sonya deliver them for her. Nolly refused to reply – Nina was too pushy for his liking – and the result was that Sonya got the blame for everything
All this childish nonsense had been forgotten long ago, but ever since those days, for Sonya the nickname Onion had been associated with malicious mockery.
“It was your fault,” Sonya said, and she smiled for the first time in the last nine days as she looked at sullen, fat, funny Nolly.
For a long time now he had been more than just a childhood friend, he was a member of the family, a younger brother, even though he was older than her. Fat, boozy, pampered Nolly, without the slightest trace of manly machismo, burdened with an unstable income and the ambitions of a failed actor.
“What was my fault? As it happens, I cancelled two recording sessions today, to mark the occasion of your birthday. I got up early and dragged myself all the way across Moscow, through a blizzard, in order to see you.”
“You could have just phoned.”
“You don’t answer.”
“Oh? Really? Why would that be?”
“Listen, maybe I ought to call you a doctor?”
“Ha-ha, I am a doctor.”
“Never mind ha-ha. You’re not a doctor, you’re a biologist. You need one of those whatever it is they’re called. Ear-nose-throat.”
“Get lost. Why don’t you just sweep the mercury out from under the bed, feed me tea and then run to the pharmacy. Pamper me like my own dear mother for at least one day in the year.”
Nolly happily started fussing over Sonya, taking her into her father’s room, laying her down on the sofa and covering her with a rug before he went to sweep up the mercury.
The briefcase proved to be strangely light, as if there was almost nothing inside it. Sonya put it on her father’s writing desk and tried not to look at it. The temptation to open it there and then was far too great.
Her father had recently flown to Germany and spent twelve days there. He’d told her he was going to stay with a former research student of his, Reznikov. When he came back he was gloomy and preoccupied. He had hardly even spoke to Sonya at all, and refused to be parted from this briefcase, even for a second – he’d bought it there, in Germany.
“Let me have a look,” Sonya said.
She had a weakness for all sorts of handbags and briefcases, and she’d noticed straightaway that her father’s briefcase had rings on its sides for a shoulder strap. This elegant and expensive little accessory would look very stylish hanging on Sonya’s shoulder.
But he wouldn’t let her look. For some reason he got angry and said she would be bound to break the lock or tear the handle off. She even thought he actually put the briefcase under his pillow at night.
Sonya tried to ask him which cities he had visited, what he had done, what he had seen and how Reznikov was getting on, but her father remained stubbornly silent or muttered vaguely about mundane household matters: Sonya hadn’t washed the dishes again, she was walking around in this terrible freezing weather without anything on her head, the faucet in the bath was leaking, there was something broken in the sofa bed, it wouldn’t fold out, and now it wasn’t wide enough for him to sleep on. The printer hadn’t worked for six months. He couldn’t watch any films, the disk drive was broken.
“You can fix everything yourself,” Sonya snapped. “You’re the engineer, the doctor of technical sciences.”
Her parents had separated five years earlier. It wasn’t actually a divorce, formally speaking they were still husband and wife. But Sonya’s mother had lived in Australia for five years now, she’d been awarded a long-term grant in some university there. And she hadn’t tried to hide from Sonya, or her father, the fact that she had a close friend in Sydney. The friend was an Australian called Roger, an elderly widower, older than Sonya’s father. Sonya had been fortunate enough to see him just once, when he flew to Moscow with her mother to meet her. He was short, a whole head shorter than Sonya’s mother, bandy-legged and bald, but with dark, curly hairs in his nostrils and ears. He had tried very hard to make a good impression on Sonya, and kept winking at her all the time. Afterwards her mother explained that poor Roger was so agitated, he’d developed a nervous tic.
To get the briefcase, she only had to get up off the sofa and walk two steps to the desk. The round, shiny locks were closed, of course. But Sonya knew where the keys were. She’d found them in her father’s dark-blue best suit when she dressed him for the funeral. The ring with two little keys on it had been neatly attached to the lining of the inside jacket pocket with a safety pin.
“By the way, about your own dear mother,” Nolly boomed, appearing in the doorway in an old apron with a pattern of ladybugs. “You haven’t forgotten that she’s arriving the day after tomorrow, have you? She called me and asked me to remind you, so that you could meet her with the car. She’s very worried about you not answering the phone. Just to be on the safe side, I made a note of the flight and the time. But how can you go to Domodedovo airport if you’re so sick?”
“It’s all right. I’ll take a few extra tablets and put you in beside me as an extra heater. When’s the flight?”
“Some time at night, half past twelve, I think.”
“Listen, what’s happening with that tea? I could really do with something warm. My throat hurts terribly.”
“Okay, just a mo. Shall I bring it here, or will you come to the kitchen?”
“I’ll come to the kitchen. I’d only spill it here.”
“That’s true enough,” Nolly chuckled. “And you should put something on your feet. You can’t go around barefoot with a temperature like that. It’s always the same problem with you.”
“I can’t help it,” Sonya sighed. “My slippers don’t live in pairs. And neither do my socks. If you can find a pair of anything, I’ll put them on.”
Nolly pulled a pair of her father’s woollen socks onto her feet. Fortunately, in her father’s room everything was in its right place, all arranged neatly in drawers. On her way through the hallway she almost knocked over the bucket of roses.
“Yes, and by the way, who sent you this gift of great beauty?” Nolly asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Your cell phone’s singing its head off, can’t you hear?”
“It’s a message. Sit me down, lean me against the wall, take the phone and read who wants to wish me a happy birthday and how they do it. Then you can tell me in your own words.”
Nolly poured tea for both of them and settled down on a stool with the phone. He spent a long time absorbed in reading her messages, occasionally whistling and shaking his head.
“It’s not so unusual,” thought Sonya, “of course, sixty-seven isn’t young any longer, it’s more than just a mature age. But then, it’s still not really a great age.”
Her father had never had problems with his heart. She had never known anyone healthier and more robust than he was. He didn’t drink alcohol, he had never smoked, he didn’t eat fatty or sweet foods and he did his morning exercises every day in front of the open window. His nerves were in good shape too. So how did he suddenly develop acute cardiac deficiency? And who was he with on that final evening in one of the most expensive and snobbish restaurants in Moscow? He couldn’t stand restaurants, especially pretentious ones like that. And if someone invited him, why didn’t they bring him home afterwards? He phoned at half past ten, gave an address and asked her to pick him up. When she arrived, he was sitting on a bench in the public garden on the square, with his arms round his briefcase. The bench was covered in snow, and he was perched on the back, looking like a snowman, he even had snowflakes glinting on his eyebrows. Sonya asked him what had happened. He said nothing had happened. It was only afterwards, after they got into the car and drove past the restaurant, that he told her he’d had dinner there that evening. He promised to tell her everything the next day. At home he complained of feeling weak and went to bed. The next morning he wasn’t breathing any longer and he was cold. Sonya called the ambulance and the crew told her he had died at about one in the morning.
“Who’s I.Z.?” Nolly asked, finally looking up from reading Sonya’s messages on the cell phone.
“Ah?” Sonya said with a start. “I.Z. – that’s the one who sent the roses. And where’s your present, by the way?”
“Just be patient, will you? Now listen:
‘Sophie, why don’t you answer the phone? We’re worried!’
‘Your guinea pig with the myoma died. Get back to me!’
‘You asked for the results of the biopsy urgently, everything’s ready, but where are you?’
‘Sophie, your article has been accepted, they want you to polish it up a bit!’
‘Haven’t you got a birthday soon? A round figure? Sorry, I’ve forgotten what the number is. Write and tell me, and I’ll wish you happy birthday.’
‘Sophie, are you ill? Answer the phone!’
“Ah, I wrote that one.”
‘Dear Sophia Dmitrievna! Happy birthday! I.Z.’
‘Sophia Dmitrievna, are you all right? How are you feeling? I.Z.’ ”
Nolly took a sip of tea and gazed at Sonya
“There you are. That one’s just arrived. Listen, Onion, who is this I.Z.?”
Sonya was about to abuse him for calling her Onion, but she started coughing.
“Is he really the one who sent the roses?” Nolly asked, taking out a cigarette and lighting it nervously.
“Yes, probably.”
“So where did he spring from?”
“I haven’t got a clue. Someone from the institute.”
She could only talk between heavy fits of coughing. But Nolly was so worked up, he didn’t notice.
“Nonsense! No one in your poverty-stricken research institute could fork out the money for a bouquet like that. Maybe you’re in for some serious romance?”
“Quite possibly,” Sonya said with a feeble smile, mastering her cough.
“But do you know him? Have you been seeing him, this I.Z.?”
“No, Nolly, no. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Then what’s going on? This is an incredibly expensive present, Sophie, not just a nice thought from some kind uncle.”
“They didn’t leave an address I could send them back to. You promised to go to the pharmacy, I’ve run out of tablets for my temperature, and I need some drops for my ear as well.”
“And you’re not going to try to find out? Clear this up?”
“How?”
“Answer him, ask who he is, maybe?”
“Yes, definitely. Only not right now.”
“Why?”
“Because my father’s died, I’m sick, and I couldn’t give a damn about anything.”
Nolly sat there for a minute in silence, smoking gloomily, then he sighed and said in a calmer voice:
“You have to thank him at least. You always did have good manners, Sophie.”
“Stop it.” Sophie pressed the back of her head against the wall and closed her eyes. “You know, my father’s old research student Reznikov was at the funeral.”
“Yes, I know. He helped carry the coffin. A bald guy, with a beard. What of it?”
“He told me he didn’t invite my father to Germany. He’s been back living in Moscow for a long time.”
“Hang on, what’s Reznikov got to do with anything?”
“Dad told me he was flying to Germany to stay with him. Dad never told lies.”
“Well, maybe it was something … you know … personal? Why not? Your mother has her boyfriend in Sydney, your father found himself someone in Berlin.”
“In Hamburg. No, Nolly. If that was it, he would definitely have told me. Listen, I’m in a really bad way here. Please go to the pharmacy. There’s some money in my purse in the hallway.”
When Nolly left, Sonya sat in the kitchen for a few minutes longer with the back of her head resting against the cold tiles of the wall and her eyes closed. She wanted her father to appear again. She knew that now she would get up, go into his room and open the briefcase, but she couldn’t get rid of the crazy idea that she mustn’t do it without his permission.
On her way to the room she squatted down and stuck her nose in the roses. Whoever this mysterious I.Z. might be, she was grateful to him. It really was the first time in her life she had ever been given a bouquet like this. If her father wasn’t dead and her middle ear wasn’t inflamed, she would probably have been absolutely delighted and felt very flattered.
She hobbled the rest of the way to her father’s room with a struggle and picked up the briefcase, feeling almost like a thief. Maybe Nolly was right and her father had acquired a girlfriend in Hamburg? That would explain why he hadn’t wanted Sonya to see him off at the airport.
They’d probably met here, in Moscow. He’d been behaving strangely for a couple of months before he went to Germany, coming back home late. It had simply never even occurred to Sonya that her elderly, stay-at-home dad could have a secret personal life of his own.
She knew that meetings of the department and the academic council never went on after midnight. Like many of his colleagues, her father used to earn a bit of money on the side by tutoring university applicants for their exams. The boys and girls often used to come here, and her father taught them in his room. He never went to their homes. But during those last two months, the department and the academic council had started holding meetings that lasted until one in the morning, and most of the lessons with the would-be students had been moved to other venues without any explanation.
Sonya could picture her very clearly, an elderly Frau, an academic lady, with neatly styled grey hair and a charming porcelain smile.
Meanwhile, the briefcase had been opened. But the only thing Sonya found in it was a small, thick envelope containing photographs, very old black and white ones.
A girl and a young man. She’s about eighteen, and he’s no more than twenty-five. The photograph was taken indoors, probably in a photo studio. They sit there, gazing at the camera, but somehow it’s as if all they can see is each other. He has dark hair, large ears that protrude slightly, a narrow face with a straight nose and thin lips. She has a thick braid of fair hair thrown forward over her shoulder and large, dark eyes. She looks bewildered and terribly vulnerable.
The small yellowish-grey rectangle had been trimmed in a fancy style round the edges. There were four numbers on the back, barely legible, written in ordinary pencil: 1939. Sonya didn’t realise straightaway that it was simply the year.
In the next photo the same couple are out in the open air. It’s not possible to tell exactly where. All that can be seen are the bare branches of trees. The young man and the girl stand beside each other. She’s wearing a coat and a hat. He’s wearing an army greatcoat, with a peaked cap pulled down to his eyebrows, and holding a longish bundle in his arms.
On looking more closely, Sonya realised it was a baby wrapped in a blanket. There was no date on the back of the photo.
In the other photographs, which were even older, Sonya saw army officers, young ladies, a grammar-school boy in his tunic and cap, a morose young man in a collarless Russian shirt. A group photograph in the yard of a military hospital, with a lot of people: wounded soldiers, nurses, doctors. The faces were too small for her to make them out. A gentleman with grey hair, although he wasn’t old, sitting alone in the same hospital yard, smoking. The young lady who appeared in the other photos, but now in a hospital nurse’s uniform. The young lady again, beside the grey-haired gentleman. And again, in a blouse with a high collar and a brooch at her throat, with a middle-aged officer. The grey-haired man again, alone, sitting at a desk in a study.
Sonya squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. Then she looked at the last photo again. She got up, switched on the ceiling light, the table lamp and the wall lamp. Then she went dashing to her own room and came back lugging an immensely thick volume that she could barely carry: “An Encyclopaedic History of Russian Medicine”. She started leafing rapidly through the pages until she finally found what she was looking for. There it was, on a glossy page with portraits of great doctors. Exactly the same photo, only larger and clearer.
The interior had been trimmed away, leaving just the face. The grey-haired gentleman. Mikhail Vladimirovich Sveshnikov. A professor at the medical faculty of Moscow University and full member of the Physical and Medical Sciences Society. A general in the tsarist army. A military surgeon. The author of outstanding works on medicine and biology, who made a substantial contribution to the study of blood formation and tissue regeneration. Born in Moscow in 1863. Time and place of death unknown.