Despite the Falling Snow (29 page)

He is pleased to have something to occupy his time, for this evening has already dragged without her there, and so he tells his mother that he will come, and that he will bring Katya, if he can pick her up when he goes past the school.

He puts down the solid black receiver, and then picks it up again. He dials the number of the school where his wife works. There is no reply.

“Of course,” he tells himself. “They are all watching the play.”

He cuts off the call and while he considers what to do, he tries the number again. This times, a man’s voice answers.

“Is this the school?” Alexander asks, frowning.

“Yes.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m the caretaker. Who are you?”

“I am Alexander Ivanov. I am looking for my wife Katya. The administrator?”

There is a grunt that, from its tone, Alexander assumes to be a grunt of recognition.

“Is she there?” he repeats.

“No, she’s not here. Nobody is here. It is nearly eight thirty at night, comrade. Nobody is here.”

The man sounds genuine. “What about the play?” asks Alexander, his stomach dropping slightly.

“What play?”

“The school play.
Peter and the Wolf
.”

“They did that last month.”

Alexander pauses. “Are they doing it somewhere else, perhaps?”

He can almost see the man shrug. “Where else would they do it?” he asks, reasonably.

Alexander does not even remember thanking the caretaker, or saying goodbye, or any of the formalities that he knows he must have completed before putting down the receiver. His heart is filled with a mixture of misgiving, fear and anger. If she is not at the school, where is she? Is she safe? Why did she lie to him? The question that recurs most often in his head. “Why did she lie?”

There is something about what has just happened that, deep down, does not shock him quite as it should. Something in his wife’s personality or nature that has made him almost expect something like this. There has always been a tiny kernel, a hidden part of her that he feels he has never seen. The certainty of this feeling has, however, been worn away over the months and years of their marriage by Katya herself. She has told him time and again that he is not logical, that he is insecure for no reason, and when she asks him what she has done to make him feel the way he does, he cannot point to any one thing. And he, knowing that she does love him, and knowing also that she would not hurt him, has slowly come to disbelieve his own gut feelings.

But now he sits forward in his chair, and then gets up and goes and lies, fully clothed, on his side of the bed. He is feeling sick with anger now. She must be with somebody. In his mind he thinks back to all the times he has felt uncertain about her, and those feelings are gradually refined and magnified until they are all that he is aware of. By the time the hallway clock chimes half past nine, he is so sad and angry that he is again sitting up. He pulls out the new
Literaturnaya Moskva
magazine -– he likes to look through the poetry and commentary, now that censorship has eased a little – but at this moment he cannot begin to make sense of the firm lines of print through the blood pounding in his temples. The telephone rings, and he snatches it up. He hears his father’s voice, and dispirited, Alexander tells him that he has a bad headache, and cannot come over. His sentences are terse and tense, and the conversation is over in seconds, after which he walks helplessly around the apartment, looking out from every window, waiting, waiting for her to come back.

It is ten o’clock now, and he has checked his watch more than ten times. Still, there is no sign of her. She is never late. He goes to the window and looks out at the street, but there is only the night guard. No Katya walking back up the road, no muffled sound of the outside door closing, no footsteps flying lightly up the stairs. For the first time, he begins to be afraid. The anger at her settles down within him so that the burning in his stomach is now like faintly glowing coals and not the licking flames of the last hour. He paces up and down, hoping she is all right, and wanting her to come in so that she can tell him the reason for the lie, for there must, he realises now, be a reason; a simple, logical reason.

At almost eleven o’clock, he is slumped in the armchair, listless, and for a few minutes he has ceased waiting on a knife edge, so that when the muffled slam of the downstairs door finally comes, he is surprised, and sits up, wondering whether he has heard it correctly. He has, for there are footsteps on the stairs, and they are hers. Before she can even place her key in the lock, he has opened the door. His manner is cool and distant, but is belied by his appearance – reddened eyes, unkempt hair, creases in his shirt where he has turned back and forth on the sofa, trying not to worry about her. She takes him in while she stands there on the threshold. She says nothing for the moment, but neither does she walk in. Something momentous has occurred or is taking place. A turning point, and she must read it and assimilate it and understand how to deal with it before she even thinks about opening her mouth to speak.

“Where were you?” he asks.

She steps inside and kisses him on his cheek, and she can feel that he has resisted the impulse to turn away from that kiss, and that he suspects something.

“I’m so sorry, Sasha,” she tells him, her voice normal, neutral. She is speaking more to the listening devices that she is sure are in their apartment, than to him directly. “The play finished at nine, and then Elena was ill. Svetlana and I stayed with her until her husband came. He took her straight to a friend of theirs who is working at the hospital. He’s a doctor. The friend.”

“I called the school.” His voice sounds sad, the harshness falling away despite his intentions. She is so plausible, so believable, she loves him, she would surely not lie – not with such detail.

“My school?”

He nods. Of course.

She smiles. “It wasn’t there. It was at the 6th district school. A joint production. We did it last month for Christmas. They did it now for New Year. Here,” and she is holding out a yellow leaflet, printed with the school names, and a picture of Peter trapping the wolf, and the date and the time and the place. He takes it and scans the information. He feels suddenly ridiculous, standing before her with his wild eyes and accusing manner.

“ I should have explained properly. I was in such a hurry, I’m sorry.”

“What was wrong with her?”

“Who? Elena?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure. Seemed like food poisoning to me. She ate some meat at dinner that was a few days old. She got it with rations, but it was the last piece, someone brought it out from the back for her. They probably had it in the shop for a week. It happens.”

He runs his hands over his head, brushing down his hair with his fingers, and then re-tucks his shirt. She has not yet taken off her coat or gloves. She holds her hat in one hand.

“Are you tired?” she asks him.

“No.”

“Shall we go for a walk? It’ll relax you.”

He feels angry again, let down in some way. Irritated that she wants him to relax, when it is her late return that has so troubled him. But before he can say anything, she pulls off a glove and places a hand over his lips. The fingers stay there, and when she knows he will not speak, they trace the line of his mouth, and her own lips go up to meet his.

“Come on,” she says, and he gets his coat and hat.

Outside, there is snow falling, very lightly, a few, delicate, downy flakes, flakes that are barely felt when they touch the skin. When she looks up at the deep grey of the night sky, she sees the white flecks tumbling down, the light weight of them making their descent seem too slow, a pace that seems out of tune with the laws of gravity, and she feels dizzy for a moment, and nauseous.

Why is she out here with him, when they should be in the warmth of their home, getting ready to sleep? What does she
want
to tell him? When she had first walked into the apartment, under the weight of his suspicion and anger, she had been concerned, perhaps even hopeful, that she would need to tell him things, to admit certain truths. But now she has told him the surface facts, about the play, and about Elena falling sick, and she can perhaps still wriggle away from his deeper uncertainties without too much effort. So why has she brought him outside? What does she
want
to tell him?

“I thought you had lied to me, about the play,” he says. “What could I think? Especially when you were so late.”

She has not lied about the play. She needs a good, true alibi for whatever she does. A lie about a play or about a woman going to a hospital, would be too easily found out and exposed. No, she has been at the play, she has sat through
Peter and the Wolf
again, and she did sit with a comforting hand on the deputy head teacher’s back watching her vomit into the stark white toilet of the school cloakroom. She tells him this again, and he nods.

“Why did you doubt me, Sasha?” she asks. She is so much in love with him that she can hardly keep her rational mind working. Her impulse is to throw her arms about his neck and beg him to forgive her for feeding his doubts, for she has been lying to him, for the last three months she has been lying. Or, at least, not telling him everything – about where she has been, what she does, whom she meets. For three months, after the two year break that Misha insisted was necessary to avoid suspicion, she has started working again, her real work, stealing his thoughts and papers and transposing them, and passing them on to the people who will use them to fight his government. His employer. His life. Even now, on the way home from the school play, she has dropped off a camera film containing snapshots of documents. Her husband’s documents, private papers from his workplace.

She has felt every minute of these past three months creeping slowly by, because she has hated every second of them. She had known that once the two year grace period was over, Misha would try to play on her doubts, on the fact that she had once sworn to dedicate her whole life to fighting the communist system. As she had expected, he had teased, and pushed and wheedled and manipulated, but still she had held firm, and even though in her mind she found some of his arguments persuasive, she would not betray her husband – she had come to believe that she must live with integrity in her own house before attempting to do so out in the world. But then Misha had played his trump card.

“Remember, Katyushka,” he had said, with a cool smile. “You already betrayed him once. Before you were married. Imagine how devastated your husband would be if he found out the love of his life married him only for his information.”

She had hated Misha at that moment. She had seen at once, at last, that he had made her steal from Alexander that first time, not as a test of her resolve, but to have something to hold over her if the plan went wrong, if she fell in love. She knows that it is that kind of foresight and ruthlessness that makes him such a good agent, but she never expected that he would use such tactics to blackmail her. She had felt trapped, confused, desperate; and so she had agreed to start spying on Alexander – anything to avoid him learning that she had betrayed him already. But instead, with each passing day, with each completed theft of his information, she has become increasingly tangled in the net, increasingly unable to find a way out of her dilemma. Until the weight of guilt has built up to such a level that part of her is now willing her husband, her victim, to find her out, so that she can confess at last, and put an end to this waking nightmare, however terrible the consequences may be.

Alexander is no longer angry, but neither does he seem embarrassed, or sorry for having accused her. Something still troubles him, she can tell, and she now realizes that it is this new awareness of his that has made her bring him out onto the wide, silent, snowy street, away from ears and eyes that should not observe them.

“Why did I doubt you, Katya? I don’t know.”

“You know I love you?”

He stops and looks at her, then nods. “Yes. But when I phoned the school, and the caretaker said there was no play, I felt terrible, and yet, a small part of me was…” he touches the snow that sits on a black railing behind them with the tip of his gloved finger. “I was not surprised. And I can’t think why that should be.”

His eyes are searching her for an answer. He has not used the diminutive of her name since she has returned, and there is a coolness to him which is new to her, and that she hates. She is the one who keeps certain aspects of herself aloof, not him. And now, a few short months later, she cannot even manage that. What has she become? She wonders. Something better, or something worse?

“I have something to tell you,” she says, quickly. Although she is far from decided about what she wants to say, she must put out a sentence that will make it more difficult for her to stop. He waits for her to continue, and he looks small against the broad background of the snow. She gestures to a bench, and together they walk to it and brush off the crisp ice that has settled upon it, and they sit down to talk.

With innate politeness, he waits for her to sit first. He is filled with misgiving. She has something to tell him. It cannot be something good, that much he knows. Is she having an affair? Is she in love with someone else? He examines his gloves and waits for her to speak. She touches the back of his neck with such affection that he cannot imagine that she does not love him any more. Then she speaks.