By now the stranger had been staring down at her for some time, however. And he was staring at her still.
‘I have the misfortune to suffer in my back, monsieur,’ she confided to him finally, in her slow and classically enunciated French. ‘It is not a large back but the pain is disproportionate. You are a doctor, perhaps? An osteopath?’
Then she wondered, looking up at him, whether he was ill, and her joke out of place. An oily gloss glistened on his jaw and neck, and there was an unseeing self-obsession about his pallid eyes. He seemed to see beyond her to some private trouble of his own. She was going to ask him this – You are perhaps in love, monsieur? Your wife is deceiving you? – and she was actually considering steering him into a café for a glass of water or a tisane when he abruptly swung away from her and looked behind him, then over her head up the street the other way. And it occurred to her that he really was afraid, not just traqué but frightened stiff; so perhaps he was not a policeman at all, but a thief, though the difference, she knew well, was often slight.
‘Your name is Maria Andreyevna Ostrakova?’ he asked her abruptly, as if the question scared him.
He was speaking French but she knew that it was not his mother tongue any more than it was her own, and his correct pronunciation of her name, complete with patronymic, already alerted her to his origin. She recognized the slur at once and the shapes of the tongue that made it, and she identified too late, and with a considerable inward start, the type she had not been able to put her finger on.
‘If it is, who on earth are you?’ she asked him in reply, sticking out her jaw and scowling.
He had drawn a pace closer. The difference in their heights was immediately absurd. So was the degree to which the man’s features betrayed his unpleasing character. From her low position Ostrakova could read his weakness as clearly as his fear. His damp chin had set in a grimace, his mouth had twisted to make him look strong, but she knew he was only banishing an incurable cowardice. He is like a man steeling himself for a heroic act, she thought. Or a criminal one. He is a man cut off from all spontaneous acts, she thought.
‘You were born in Leningrad on May 8, 1927?’ the stranger asked.
Probably she said yes. Afterwards she was not sure. She saw his scarred gaze lift and stare at the approaching bus. She saw an indecision near to panic seize him, and it occurred to her – which in the long run was an act of near clairvoyance – that he proposed to push her under it. He didn’t, but he did put his next question in Russian – and in the brutal accents of Moscow officialdom.
‘In 1956, you were granted permission to leave the Soviet Union for the purpose of nursing your sick husband, the traitor Ostrakov? Also for certain other purposes?’
‘Ostrakov was not a traitor,’ she replied, cutting him off. ‘He was a patriot.’ And by instinct she took up her shopping bag and clutched the handle very tight.
The stranger spoke straight over this contradiction, and very loudly, in order to defeat the clatter of the bus : ‘Ostrakova, I bring you greetings from your daughter Alexandra in Moscow, also from certain official quarters! I wish to speak to you concerning her! Do not board this car!’
The bus had pulled up. The conductor knew her and was holding his hand out for her bag. Lowering his voice, the stranger added one more terrible statemene ‘Alexandra has serious problems which require the assistance of a mother.’
The conductor was calling to her to get a move on. He spoke with pretended roughness, which was the way they joked. ‘Come on, mother! It’s too hot for love! Pass us your bag and let’s go!’ cried the conductor.
Inside the bus there was laughter; then someone shouted an insult – old woman, keeps the world waiting! She felt the stranger’s hand scrabbling inexpertly at her arm, like a clumsy suitor groping for the buttons. She pulled herself free. She tried to tell the conductor something but she couldn’t; she opened her mouth but she had forgotten how to speak. The best she could manage was to shake her head. The conductor yelled at her again, then waved his hands and shrugged. The insults multiplied – old woman, drunk as a whore at midday! Remaining where she was, Ostrakova watched the bus out of sight, waiting for her vision to clear and her heart to stop its crazy cavorting. Now it is I who need a glass of water, she thought. From the strong I can protect myself. God preserve me from the weak.