She had woken this morning to find herself seemingly bound hand and foot. She had tried to move one leg and, immediately, burning cords had tightened round her thighs and chest and stomach. She had raised an arm, but only against the tugging of iron ligatures. She had taken a lifetime to crawl to the bathroom and another to get herself undressed and into the warm water. And when she entered it, she was frightened that she had fainted from the pain, her flailed flesh hurt so terribly where the road had grazed it. She heard a hammering and had thought it was inside her head, till she realized it was the work of a furious neighbour. When she counted the church clock’s chimes, they stopped at four, so no wonder the neighbour was protesting at the thunder of running water in the old pipes. The labour of making coffee had exhausted her but sitting down was suddenly unbearable, lying down just as bad. The only way for her to rest was to lean herself forward, elbows on the draining-board. From there she could watch the courtyard, as a pastime and as a precaution, and from there she had seen the men, the two creatures of darkness, as she now thought of them, mouthing to the concierge, and the old goat of a concierge, Madame la Pierre, mouthing back, shaking her fool head – ‘No, Ostrakova is not here, not here’ – not here in ten different ways, that echoed like an aria round the courtyard – is not here – drowning the clipping of carpet-beaters and the clatter of children and the gossip of the two turbaned old wives on the third floor, leaning out of their windows two metres apart – is not here! Till a child would not have believed her.
If she wanted to read, she had to put the book on the draining-board, which, after the men came, was where she kept the gun as well, till she noticed the swivel on the butt-end, and with a woman’s practicality improvised a lanyard out of kitchen string. In that way, with the pistol round her neck, she had both her arms free when she needed to hand herself across the room. But when it prodded her breasts she thought she would retch from the agony. After the men left again, she had started reciting aloud while she went about the chores she had promised herself she would observe during her imprisonment. ‘One tall man, one leather coat, one Homburg hat,’ she had murmured, helping herself to a generous ration of vodka to restore her. ‘One broad man, one balding pate, grey shoes with perforations!’ Make songs of my memory, she had thought; sing them to the magician, to the General – oh, why don’t they answer my second letter?
She was a child again, falling off her pony, and the pony came back and trampled her. She was a woman again, trying to be a mother. She remembered the three days of impossible pain in which Alexandra fiercely resisted being born into the grey and dangerous light of an unwashed Moscow nursing home – the same light that was outside her window now, and lay like unnatural dust over the polished floors of her apartment. She heard herself calling for Glikman – ‘Bring him to me, bring him to me.’ She remembered how it had seemed to her that sometimes it was he, Glikman her lover, whom she was bearing, and not their child at all – as if his whole sturdy, hairy body were trying to fight its way out of her – or was it into her? – as if to give birth at all would be to deliver Glikman into the very captivity she dreaded for him.
Why was he not there, why would he not come? she wondered, confusing Glikman with the General and the magician equally. Why don’t they answer my letter?
She knew very well why Glikman had not come to her as she wrestled with Alexandra. She had begged him to keep away. ‘You have the courage to suffer, and that is enough,’ she had told him. ‘But you have not the courage to witness the suffering of others, and for that I love you also. Christ had it too easy,’ she told him. ‘Christ could cure the lepers, Christ could make the blind see and the dead come alive. He could even die in a sensible cause. But you are not Christ, you are Glikman, and there’s nothing you can do about my pain except watch and suffer too, which does nobody any good whatever.’