VanCleef Arpels on the summer night

Ïåðåâîä íà àíãëèéñêèé ðîìàíà “Van Cleef & Arpels â ëåòíþþ íî÷ü».

Ê ìîåìó áîëüøîìó ñîæàëåíèþ, ÿ íèêàê íå ìîãó âîññòàíîâèòü èìÿ ïåðåâîä÷èêà. Âûðàæàþ åìó ìîþ èñêðåííþþ áëàãîäàðíîñòü.

VanCleef & Arpels on the summer night

To Theo

Disparage not the faith thou dost not know…

 “A Midsummer Night’s  Dream” by W. Shakespeare

1

I was driving back from work in the evening at about nine, around the Ring.  I kept changing lanes, but there were so many cars that this didn’t make much of a difference.  It was drizzling. In the subway under Tverskaya Street two SUVs had collided – a Lexus and a Mercedes (I hate that Mercedes model; it always reminds me of a bier), blocking one of the lanes. The car crash wasn’t at all serious, but neither party would drive away. They were waiting for militiamen. Their lights twinkled beautifully, like a couple of figure-skaters at the European Championship. I thought of Beloussova and Protopopov. I had been a little girl when they were real celebrities; they had stayed in Western Europe and were nearly killed in a car accident. Sometimes the strangest associations occur to you.

I had to pop into Stockmann, but I was reluctant to use the underground parking. I looked for some space nearby, and found a vacant place near the Bulgarian restaurant. The restaurant is the only building in Smolenskaya Square which has not been restored, and in my opinion, it’s beyond repair. The building is miserable, lopsided, and oblique, with dirty windows and horrible grocery stores that haven’t changed since the Perestroika period. Once I forced myself to visit this particular restaurant, in order to properly remember a period in my past.  The visit allowed me to reassure myself that I did everything right back then.  And now, the place no longer holds any attraction for me. 

In Stockmann, I picked up a little bit of everything, as usual – including washing powder – and queued up with my cart for the cash counter. There was a longish queue at the other cash counter, too.  I recognized my old lover standing in it.

He was not really old, of course – but he belongs, in my mind, to a time many years ago, to which I have never returned.   I looked at his familiar hand, now bearing a wedding ring, and at his fashionable clothes and his full cart – and I turned my head away, to indicate that I wasn’t going to acknowledge him.   Nothing remained between us.  The essence of our relationship was exhausted, dried up.  It was like a shrivelled leaf, blowing in the wind.  He happened to be in Stockman at the same time as me, for whatever reason.  It was none of my business. But all the same, I couldn’t resist giving him a second, surreptitious glance. He was in front of the stand of English books, looking for something, turning over the first few pages of some of the books.   He didn’t look as though he was about to leave.

I began to take out my groceries and put them on the conveyor belt.
          - Your permanent buyer’s card, your parking license – jabbered the cashier.
I took out my buyer’s card and my credit card as well.
          -  No parking license,  – I replied, glancing over at him again.
He was paying. After all that, he had bought a book with a red cover. And now, Sergey,
you may leave the store, I whispered to him. I walked past the cash counter and began to pack everything into plastic bags, never turning my head.
          -  Give me your passport and your driving license, please, – the cashier girl said, continuing our conversation.
I took out my driving license.
          -  Thank you, – The girl responded correctly, just as she’d been taught.
I had three full bags. One of them was quite heavy – with water and a pineapple in it – the other two were lighter, but still big.
- Sign, please, – she gave me a check and a pen.
I signed nervously and picked up my bags, never looking back, and headed up towards the exit. Nobody was following me. At the exit I straightened my back and looked round. There was nobody behind me. He spoiled that whole shopping trip for me, I thought to myself.

In reality, he probably had no intention of greeting me at all, but I couldn’t help thinking that if he didn’t mean to say hello, then he wouldn’t have spent so much time hanging about that bookstand. Romance – that’s what he wanted. A new one. He chose it right before my eyes. He couldn’t have failed to notice me. He always took note of any female within a ten-kilometer radius.  Maybe he disliked me so much he didn’t even want to say hi…? This horrible thought made me raise my eyebrows in spite of all the botox injections. But I soon calmed down – plenty of even better looking men pay me attention. Then I saw the Mercury Pavillion and remembered about the galuchat bracelets. I had to have a look. I turned round. Still no-one behind me. I didn’t want to carry my shopping bags to the jewelry shop. I turned round again. The security guards were clearly having fun watching my indecision – they can find something to ridicule even in the smallest events. I headed for my car.

I should say now that I have not seen him since this day. 

I barely managed to carry all the bags to the boot of the car. Women aren’t built for grocery shopping. I was sitting in front of the steering wheel when my mobile phone rang. It was my girlfriend calling, the one who can’t get through an evening alone.  She feels bored. Me, for example, I can easily be alone. Not in a forest, obviously, or on some ranch, but in the city I’m happy to be alone.  This loneliness is entirely voluntary – I have been married twice and I’m in no hurry to tie the knot for a third time.  Although there is a candidate – a decent, forty-five year old guy.  He has blue eyes.  They’re probably the best thing about his very masculine character.  All men are so similar!  But that doesn’t really matter.  The most important thing is for a man to have appeal for some inexplicable reason, to surprise you – in a good way, of course – and to not get boring.  Apartments, money, securities… those are indispensable components of attraction, but also secondary ones – though they do speak strongly to your taste, and resonate with fundamental aspects of the evolutionary process.  If you can manage to work with all this a little bit, then good things quite easily happen – at any age. Incidentally, I dislike thirty-year-old men most of all: the cheeky, self-assured, sporty males. Inheritors of the family business.  Worthy sons. Unfaithful, hungry, handsome, with sharp tongues. Dreaming only about toys. You can’t get through to them. By the age of forty, or maybe just after forty, men like this sometimes find another version of themselves. Some invisible shell, like an eggshell, comes off their hearts all of a sudden and they begin to really notice the world and women. Speaking frankly, I can’t take the opposite sex seriously at all. With men, you can’t plan anything – it’s a question of chance, and nothing more. When two people separate, even if they try to postpone the separation or pretend it’s not happening – because they don’t want to lose all the benefits, because they feel bad for their children – it’s still a separation. Whether the experience is painful and acrimonious or smooth, they still do it for the sake of love – for themselves, for him, for her, for their futures.  They might sacrifice their health, career, friends, or simply a lot of money for their separation, but if they have strong personalities, they will always come out on top. Here again the supernatural is at work. And there is only one governing law – the law of love. Life is granted to everyone simply to fulfill this law – to the ballet-dancer, the mathematician, the banker, the doctor, the musician, the spy, the photographer, the teacher, the fireman, the clergyman, even the president. There are so many different couples out there: pretty ones, uninteresting ones, plain ones, weird ones, absurd and dangerous ones.…  I often lose myself in thoughts like these.  But I hardly ever tell anybody about them.

My mind is always clearest in the morning. I am not simply a morning person – I’m five morning people all rolled into one. This, however, isn’t quite to everyone’s taste. I think we early risers are definitely in a minority.  In the morning I like to delve into my thoughts about life and make decisions about the day ahead. In the daytime and evening I fulfill those plans. But the evening of that trip to Stockmann was a dark one; the day was already over. I wanted to get back to my warm apartment, to squeeze into my soft slippers and read for a while – so that was what I told the friend who called me, that I was completely knackered and not in the mood to go anywhere. I ignored the hints she was dropping in an attempt to get me to invite her to come over for a cup of tea, although I do always have a bottle of good wine or champagne close at hand. I knew that she’d have wanted to stay the night afterwards. We would have had to share a bed, albeit a comfortable and spacious one. I have no other bed to sleep in. In the hall, or in the guestroom (I’m not quite sure what to call my most spacious room, which I use as a hall, a kitchen, a dining room, where I keep my bookshelves and my dishes), there are a couple of armchairs and a round sofa, but the sofa’s not very comfortable to lie on.  So anyone wanting to stay over has to sleep in my bed with me. Quite understandably, I’m not always in the mood to share. But the real reason I didn’t want to see my friend is that I didn’t want to listen to her depressive talk (so unfamiliar to my way of thinking), to stories of her martyrdom in the quest for new sources of gratuitous material aid from male acquaintances, who never succeed in satisfying her legitimate female needs and who inevitably disappear, hardly having appeared in the first place. It is always not the right thing. I never give much thought to her stories and nothing she tells me comes as a surprise. This is because she basically imagines most of the things, and her deep suffering is in proportion to the bright, interesting image she creates.  Nevertheless, she does manage free of charge (that is, at somebody else’s expense) to travel all over the world, living in expensive hotels and buying fashionable clothes, sometimes even securing some nice cushy job. Fluent English, French and Italian – knowledge acquired thanks to this very martyrdom – these are marketable products in this country nowadays, especially if combined in the same person. And especially if this person is a female, and a well groomed one. I won’t go into detail about her figure. The paradox is that my friend has never really wanted to work, unlike some of the power women of my generation, who are sometimes even prepared to stay overnight at work. Though it’s probably not even a paradox, but a kind of personal philosophy that occasionally produces the desired results. To cut a long story short, we speak different languages, distorting in our own way the truth of the male figure facing us.  She’s no fool; she knows exactly what’s expected of her.  And ultimately, everyone gets their own slice of cake. 

I said goodbye to her and switched off the phone.  It had begun to drizzle again.  I’m always losing my umbrellas and gloves. When I was a little girl I would also lose my handkerchiefs.  This would make my grandmother angry.  What an idiot; here I am again without an umbrella.  I was angry with myself. Things were worse than usual because that afternoon I’d paid a fair amount for a new hairdo, and wasn’t eager to expose my head to the drizzling rain. I got out of the car, hurried over the piazza to Smolenskaya passage, which slightly resembles Paris’s Rue de Rivoli, and headed towards a new umbrella.

Sergey was on my mind all the while. Time had played its game with him, but he had managed to remain a handsome man. I remembered him ankle-deep in water with his jeans rolled up on the beach in the evening in Tunisia. I remembered him chasing me – I was in my early twenties at that time – along the sea edge. I thought then, that I would burst, I was so full of new impressions… summer in the middle of winter, Carthage looming in the distance, my own irresistible beauty. I am not really sure what Sergey was thinking about. He was two years older than me. It was in the early eighties; we were Soviet students doing our practical training in an Arab country.

Various thorny negotiations at Camp David between the USA, Israel and Egypt over the problem of another Middle East peace process prevented me from going to Cairo University, because the principled Soviet state decided to temporarily interrupt its diplomatic relationship with Egypt.  As a result I found myself in quite a different country, with a different dialect of Arabic and French as a second language instead of English – which had been like a native tongue for me since my school years. But having come to Africa, I found that I was quite happy.

A lot of things happened for the first time: a whole year spent far from home without my parents in a capitalist country, where everything is prohibited and those things which are not prohibited should not be used – because the price is not worth it.  The whole year tightly scheduled, the vigilant eyes of others on me – people with influential acquaintances in Moscow.   This first trip really was a major test of my trustworthiness and survival capacity; dealing with my first harsh criticism and its consequences, quarrels, pettiness, na;ve impulses of the heart nipped in the bud, and, after all, kindness, cooperation, interesting acquaintances, trips, the discovery of a new reality, a new world and Arabic in particular. And then, of course, the return. 

- Did she really live abroad for a year?  –  such a question at that time had great import.  I had had the chance to form an objective impression of our country. The conclusions I came to during that year in Tunisia drastically changed my life. I failed the trial and became disillusioned with the Soviet way of life. It was not Tunisia which overwhelmed me. I was overwhelmed by our people there. Their actions, sometimes violent, were inherently abominable. The way they treated us…. I was ashamed by the behavior of our teachers, doctors, and engineers; by the horrible conditions in which they lived; by the miserable money they were paid; by the dreams for which they suffered all that.

Now it seems quite natural – to have one’s own opinion, to say the things you think are right, to disagree with the crowd, to educate your children privately, to travel to Milan to buy some clothes. We have begun to forget a lot, to embellish things. Of course there were things which were good: it was a superpower, with a great number of scientific research centers, low prices for household essentials (for understandable reasons).  But I perceive life in from the viewpoint of an individual person – my own self. I would not want to read releases of Meeting ÕÕÕ issued by the only party, uncontrollably experimenting with social modeling. I would far rather be reading the new Russian Vogue than waiting for a bus at the bus stop, or queuing up in a shop to buy Polish lipstick.   

It was New Year’s Eve, 1984.  We left the ambassadorial club, where they were spouting official political toasts over tables spread with Olivier salad and Danish canned ham, to the sound of plastic corks popping from bottles of semi-sweet Soviet champagne. When the high-ranking officials of the Embassy had duly expressed their wishes and left for their apartments to celebrate with their nearest and dearest, and the music was turned on, we escaped, climbed over the fence and hurried to the sea.  It was quite a distance from there to the sea, however, and some peasant in a shabby van gave us a lift. My companion, whom I was to encounter at the cash counter in Stockmann all those years later, squeezed a couple of dinars into his hand and wished him a happy New Year.

There were plenty of umbrellas, both expensive and cheap ones.  I chose up a green one like usual, so it would match the car.   

Before going home, I looked through the biography of a foreign woman, who had been invited to deliver some lectures on the perception of jewelry to potential Eastern European clients. Her thesis, written in Cambridge, was devoted to jewelry in the portraits done by Florentine masters of the Renaissance.  I felt a melancholy somewhat similar to the feelings of a second rate actor, seeing Hamlets, Khlestakovs, Jourdains and the like, cursing his tray with a glass of water which he must carry out at the right moment with a simple “dinner is served”. That was the way things were. World universities had been inaccessible for us. Our conception of jewelry was limited to the State Diamond Fund at most, and local production didn’t warrant such theses. We had many other experiences instead, of course, but that’s not what I’m driving at.  This visiting speaker was an Italian woman who had no doubt been surrounded by Florentine masters since her early childhood.  I felt melancholy because in my twenties I had not been able to recognize my inner abilities and wishes. I didn’t really discover this world until the age of forty, after much strolling to and fro, even traveling between countries….

I paid several hundred to hear her lecture Perception of Jewelry. It put me in mind of a description aimed at savages, detailing how to serve a table full of white people.  How could she have known that such terms as carat, guilloche, pave were second nature to us, that we had all handled pearls, that her audience would be decked out in jewelry from the latest collections of  Cartier, Bvlgari, and VanCleef & Arpels»? She was going through her usual routine for the natives, smiling condescendingly and glancing at her watch.  Almost all women base their opinion on details that they arrange after an event into some final composition of their own.   She must have been annoyed by our Moscow habits, drastically different from those of her well-to-do fellow Italians, and she probably assumed we were the fashionable wives of New Russians who had made a fortune playing foul games.  By the end of the third hour my right-hand neighbor put her beautifully coiffed head on the table and succumbed to sleep.  I wasn’t going to disturb her. And it was only at this moment that the Italian lady became animated.  Maybe she was thinking about tomatoes thrown at the mediocre tenor; at any rate, she began to look tentatively into our faces. But it was far too late. Later on we had tea and they handed out diplomas to us, certifying that we had listened to her lecture. In a word, it was just rubbish. Well, perhaps there were a few interesting examples, and a story of how they had found fake pearls among the belongings of Wallace Simpson, which had been auctioned as the genuine article. In fact a lot of famous women added fakes to their jewelry collections: it is impossible always to speak only the truth and to abstain from gentle dalliance with men we oughtn’t to flirt with. “Out of the question!” Restrictions pursue us from our babyhood nappies, or as we should say now, our pampers, till the day we die. Sometimes restrictions can have a positive effect, as they force us to think smarter and jump higher to reach the forbidden fruit of our illusions.

By the sea back then everything was forbidden to us. Even solitude. We chatted a little bit about local scenery, the route, Carthage, which will outlive us all, about the Tunisians, who should have cared more about it, about the marvelously tasty sea air (for four whole months I had been without a sore throat, so I no longer wore my scarf as I usually do during the Moscow winter), about palms, about scorpions, and about his waiting for this night since the first day when we had landed...

I walked back to my car, reminiscing. Echoes of that period had not come to me for a long time. To begin with I didn’t let myself lapse into memories, and then later I got used to looking ahead.   But now, I automatically switched off to the spring rain tapping on my new purchase, to the forthcoming trip to Geneva for the annual fair of exquisite watches and clocks, to the new raincoat in the car trunk and to the blue eyes of my close distant friend.



































2

The Bolshoi Theater, new stage, auditorium. I won’t go into detail about the beauty and originality of the interior decoration. Well – I should probably mention the ceiling, at least, with the chandelier right in the center.   I saw something like it in Moscow, in Slava Cinema when I was a schoolgirl. At first sight the comparison is not absolutely exact, but so what?  The thought struck me anyway. A folding seat in the orchestra stalls. All of a sudden I began to long for The Nutcracker, for the excited and eternally tragic music of Tchaikovsky. I opened the program booklet: “It seems that in the 20th century no choreographer – from the great traditional George Balanchine right up to the super-avant-guarde choreographer Mark Morris – has resisted the temptation of plunging into the languor of the sounds of Tchaikovsky... As his music could not be kept within the framework of a nice, simple fairy-tale for schoolchildren, it erupted into the space of tragic philosophical generalizations».

I was six when my mother took me to see The Nutcracker.  “Bravo Vasiliev! Bravo Maksimova!” chanted the audience. I’ll never forget that couple.  But I couldn’t call that ballet a fairytale. For two months after that, I had a dream that I went to the children’s New Year party with Kostik Sokolov, a boy from my kindergarten who I didn’t really care for in real life – we never even played together.  However, like me he loathed tea with milk and that strange soup the Russians make with pickled cucumbers. After that visit to the Bolshoi I began notice grown-up music, and to develop an affection for the ballet.

That excellent performance lingered in my mind for a long time; it inspired me, helped to dispel feelings of despair, to overcome disappointment in other people more easily, to cope with our inability to change the certain difficult circumstances, to put the insignificant to one side, to see through to the essence of things. It’s a life source, a miracle of human sensitivity. But I never dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer or even of attending dancing classes. I preserved the ballet for myself just like that – viewed from the perspective of the audience. I had no specialist knowledge of it and never intended to acquire any. This is how we delighted in contemplating a castle when we have no idea about architectural drawings, construction problems, all the research the designer had to do…. Nevertheless, I do sometimes muse on the creativity of choreographer, and on the lives of the people in the ballet profession.

After the Nutcracker life went back to normal: boutiques, sales, customers, orders, reports from the office. In the office almost everyone’s trying to be the boss, pretending to formulate brilliant strategic solutions, spinning intrigues, sucking up to overseas directors, putting on airs around us, while those down behind the shop counters seek favoritism, scrambling to get closer to the powers-that-be. This is the place where you can take real advantage of what’s on offer: power, trips, cars, and money are all at your disposal, and you get paid for nothing but pretending to work, and for feeling tired at the end of the day.  Of course it’s tiring, nobody denies that!  You should keep the boss interested, surprise him wherever possible; colleagues should be made fools of as often as possible; you should plagiarize other people’s ideas; make sure you look like a million dollars thanks to beauty salons and fashionable clothes; and implicitly understand what the boss appreciates and how he likes things done.  Add to that constant pressure because of your ever-present competitors. The most important thing is to keep everything under control, squashing any parvenus in good time; to be ready to produce tears at any moment and bewail your childhood spent in poverty in a distant Soviet town; and to be able to squeeze as much out of your boss as possible as when the opportunity arises. In-between all this, you can also temporarily marry someone as a tactical move, or simply live with someone, depending on how things work out – crucially, don’t loll in front of the TV by yourself on Sundays or be seen going to the cinema with a girlfriend.  And then the boss will be jealous; he’ll appreciate you and think that he’s not the only man who wants you.  He’s male, after all.   

I am quite sure that the foreigners who risked so much to come to this unknown and enticing Russia in the early nineties to set up their multimillion businesses here will have plenty of memories to entertain them in their old age.  They could not in their wildest dreams have anticipated the vigour with which they were attacked by girls from the provinces looking for a new life.  The newcomers certainly had the opportunity to enjoy the time they spent here.  They could paint themselves as whatever they wanted: as hereditary aristocrats, children of millionaires, scientists, internationally renowned philanthropists… they could invent anything about their past life.  They could describe things they’d read in books, things they’d seen in films – the girls would believe it all, take it all seriously.  Later on they came to believe their own fantasies of adventurous youth.  Their contemporaries were all telling the same lies.  Everyone was doing their best to pursue their own goals.  And these poor miserable childhoods, although faked, seemed to be the fuel needed to launch their jets into the sky of promise.   Well, I consider myself quite a tolerant person.  If you want to improve the world, start by improving yourself. Why should anybody tell these girls about the damage caused by smoking, about the dangers of dubious sexual relations and obsession with material possessions? Sometimes your wealth becomes your insomnia, your punishment, sapping away at your life.   It’s better to strive not to be poor and to find another basis for your relationships with other people.  But the only person to whom I could give this very sound advice was me myself.  That was what I did.

I got a call from the office about sales.  In this trade, sales are unquestionably the major index. We were doing our best. We offered jewelry of the very highest quality, really top rate. It was VanCleef & Arpels Boutique. That’s one of the most popular and respected names of the world jewelry. Not everything worked out the way we wanted it to: insufficient PR, not enough advertisement, shipping delays for new items… and as there was no showcase in the street, the majority of our potential customers didn’t even visit us.  Nevertheless, with each new year we were gradually developing.

After working with Cartier sales, the pace felt very different to me, but then so did the jewelry and the clients.  Cartier’s motif is aggression – you must; it’s aimed at the majority market.  They advertise in practically every newspaper, with no expense spared: images of Monica, cats, giraffes, tanks, red bags.  The motif of VanCleef & Arpels, by contrast, is the lady, the woman, with whom you dream to escape to wonderful distant places; who takes you by the arm and you find you no longer care where in the world you are; with whom the evening instantaneously becomes surprising and marvelous, and you dance and sing. This beauty is not to be offered to everyone – and this is the key point.

I skimmed the morning papers. Everything seemed fine. I asked the office cleaner to wipe down the glasses of the showcases once again. I opened one and took out a ruby ring, called Forest.  It was star-shaped – that is, the rubies were laid in a star shape. They were bright red, burning. The stones were set in an invisible frame, perfectly aligned with one another. It was made using the unbeatable VanCleef & Arpels technique, patented in the beginning of the 1930ies. To set one ruby in this way takes the master jeweler from one to two and a half hours. There are only two master jewelers with such skills in the company, and they are the only two in the whole world. It’s a real gem. Why Forest? They spend a lot of time thinking up the names.  Is this gem meant to be a star in the forest? Or is it a red autumn leaf, shining in the evening rays of the Northern sun? Shine, shine, my star  – as the Russian song goes – there won’t ever be any other like you.  Anyway, it’s better that the star carries some personal significance for whoever beholds it.   And there’s no need to be reminded about that.
- The call is for you - Helen handed over the receiver to me.
- Hello!
- If we want things to stay the same, things will have to change; - a baritone voice said, melodic, familiar, perfect in each sigh.
- Sometimes one changes unrecognizably - I replied.  So he had noticed me in Stockmann after all.
-  How could I have failed to recognize you?
- Or pretended that you didn’t...
- I was trying to suppress emotional shock, dear.
- And who won eventually, you or emotional shock?
- Could I invite you to the theater? - he paused - Are you still fond of ballet?
- As you are, if I remember correctly?
- Yes, in my own way - Sergey laughed.
I thought for a while, and consented. I stood up to place the ring back in the showcase. Lena, the salesgirl, shook the hair away from her forehead and gave me a wink.
- Yesterday you got a perfect haircut – I said to her, winking back. 
- Dima left, so I have to ask the others.
- You mean to do your hair?
- You want your hair cut as well?
- I do. Why has Lenia disappeared? - I didn’t like this news at all.  Who could I trust with my image now?  I felt kind of upset. We had been going to Dima for several years; he was a master and a creator. He was Lena’s own discovery.
- He left for Guinea - she responded.
- To work there? As a hairdresser? – Naturally, this surprised me.
- No, to pay a visit to his grandmother, - Lena joked. – He started working as a gold digger - she continued.
- Searching for diamonds? Are you for real?!
- As far as I know he went over with an acquaintance from Bauman’s University as a programmer. They found something. Everybody finds something out there. Oh, and rubies too.  Neither of them has come back.

I took out my appointment book. There was a political map of the World. I opened it at Africa and found Guinea. Then I remembered from my courses that there were no kimberlite deposits in Guinea, although something else like lamproite was found there, but I couldn’t be sure that was quite correct.   Within these deposits of the second type other precious stones could be found, like rubies or sapphire, which basically belong to the same corund. And sure there were also colored diamonds, such as the brown ones.
- Just think about it! - I was still surprised.
- In the salon they told me that he isn’t likely to come back to work. Last time someone heard from him was an email he sent to one of his colleagues from Goa.  He was spending his holiday there. 
- Well, I hope he hasn’t lost his scissors so he won’t starve.
- Lenia? Starve?
- Well, take it easy, I guess. Life’s an unpredictable thing; only the sun doesn’t struggle to rise.  What do you reckon, is he gay?
- Hard to say… in all probability, though, yes. His favorite dream was to visit San Francisco at Halloween and to go for a walk through Haight-Ashbury.
- That’s a typical gay dream. And a handful of rubies would definitely help him to fulfill it.
- A handful of rubies would be very helpful for many things, - sighed Lena.
- He must have been bored in the salon, in spite of his talent and all his exquisite customers. He was dreaming of things.
- Of  what things?
- I think that if he has money to spare now, you’ll need to find another hairdresser.
- Do you think he’ll actually set off for California?
- Dreams are a serious thing, birdie - I told Lena, who was quite young and pretty. Incidentally, so are all the other girls in our boutique.
















































3
Sergey invited me to a Balanchine evening at the Bolshoi Theatre. Bach’s Concerto Barocco was being played, along with a pas-de-deux from Tchaikovsky’s Lebedinoye Ozero (Swan Lake), Agon by Stravinsky, and Bizet’s Symphony in C-major.

What did I know about Balanchine, about his life and works? I knew that he had been Jacqueline Kennedy’s guest of honour at the White House in winter of 1961. Once, a long time ago, I had read about this visit in a book by Bernard Taper. She had invited Balanchine to the White House to ask his advice on how best to promote the development of Arts in the U.S.  Balanchine was no exception to the rule; he came away charmed, like so many others lucky enough to spend time with her.

A little bit later, speaking along with other celebrities in a media discussion on the topic of ‘If I were president…’, he stated that he would agree to become the president on the condition that Jacqueline Kennedy remained the first lady, and that with her help he would do everything in his power to bring beauty into the lives of others. 

She was pale, and looked a little tired during their meeting, but her pearl necklace, fixed on the left with two narrow diamond pins, rendered this pallor gentle and mysterious, so that Balanchine remarked ‘I don’t know who designed that marvelous bijou, but it really is made for you’.   He felt as if he were D’Artagnan in front of the Queen. He felt as if he could swim across the English Channel or do something impossible for her.  He didn’t remember much of the plot of The Three Musketeers, but the wonderful readiness for the selfless folly remained.
- It’s VanCleef & Arpels, - Jacqueline smiled at him.

Later on he sent her a letter, which was unusual for him.  In it he wrote (also according to Taper) that her husband was busy with serious international problems, and that nobody could reasonably expect him to pay the same kind of attention to arts and culture. But the woman, he wrote, always remains the source of inspiration. The male half of humanity mostly takes care of material issues, while the female half takes care of the soul. The woman is the world, in which the man lives, and she makes a home of this world for him. Inspiration in art is born thanks to the woman. God creates, the woman inspires, and the man unites these two factors. He also wrote that the woman is the prime source of beauty in life, and that the man should be subservient to this... or something like that.

She responded in a polite and official way.
He responded to her reply with his new works, which might, to some extent, have been inspired by her image….

- Have you been busy with jewelry for a long time? – asked Sergey.  The performance was going to begin in five minutes.  Our seats were good ones, in the box number 11, near the imperial box. It was the perfect place to watch the ballet from. The Hall gradually filled up with people.
- Almost eight years have passed. So long and yet so short a time. – I was looking at people in the orchestra stalls. You could tell that they had dressed up to come to the theatre. 
- Nothing’s ever enough for you. – He semi-reproached me in his own meaningful way.
- Is that pleasant remark actually referring to anything in particular?  – I asked.
- No. It is not.
He kept absolutely quiet, as though he and I often went to the theatre together, or at least saw each other occasionally.  Nevertheless, he did look at me surreptitiously every now and then. I pretended not to notice. I had the intuition that he wanted something from me. Somehow I could not take his sentimental feelings for real. Well, I suppose I probably flattered my feminine vanity with his attentions a little bit.
- Who are you married to now? – I asked all of a sudden, wanting to know.
- Let Balanchine be the third in our company today. He patted my right knee lightly. – Don’t get distracted. I will always have plenty of time to answer all your questions.
- Are you trying to reassure me? Beware of getting no answers yourself, - I tried to tease him.

The imperial box was occupied by two ladies in Channel suits and some pompous men, with the former Minister of Culture in the front line. All of them were quite conceited, and one of them was looking around attentively, reminding me of the way the frontiersmen stood on patrol in accordance with military regulations during the Soviet period, protecting the sacred territory and studying each branch and blade of grass. He was not even speaking. All of a sudden he met my eyes and I decided to greet him, just for a joke. He nodded back to me, showing off even in the theatre.   I turned back.

In Tunis they nicknamed me Sardine.  Sergey reminded me of this now: ‘Get ready for the Art, Sardine, tune in for the music and the ballet’. I did so.

The lights went out. The orchestra began playing. The curtains swept back.…  With every minute the performance became more and more intriguing. It was quite another kind of ballet. The dance was depicting the music; it was not quite clear what was accompanying what. Plot was rendered totally unnecessary. It was kind of symbiosis of light and ballet and music. First it seemed a bit weird, as though I was waiting for a prince who was never going to come. The most important thing was that it was not showcasing some kind of artful technique or elegant sequence of movements: it was another vision entirely, the same kind of beauty presented in a different way – the beauty of the human body and of musicality. It soon became clear to me that even costumes and decorations were superfluous. Each ballerina was her own self: young, airy, light, like a morning dream of a better world to come.  ‘Ballet is the most innocent, the most ethical of all the arts. If it were not so, why should people always take their children to the theatre?’  This was what Tchaikovsky told his friend Herman Laroche on reading in some newspaper that the ballet exists just to excite the faded desires of old men. I read about it in Passion for Tchaikovsky by Solomon Volkov. A lot was also written about plot in that book, about how Peter Ilyich actually had no serious interest in plot – and indeed, how can anybody take the plot of Lebedinoye Ozero (Swan Lake) seriously? It’s not like Richard III, for example, in which there’s absolutely no need for dance.   Dance cannot represent people’s intrigues and fratricide on stage nearly as well as words can.  Mood and sense, however, can be depicted by the ballet. Is it really more powerful? When the brilliant union of a composer and a choreographer takes place, then yes, it can be much more powerful. And everybody is free to their own artistic preferences, their own modes of self-expression, according to their soul’s needs at different moments in their lives.  The only thing that strikes me as undeniable is that it is very difficult for a person without art – it is almost impossible to develop, to acquire a full knowledge of life, to be kind and loving.  Well, the actor just recites phrases learnt by heart, the musician reads the music, the ballet-dancer knows exactly how to move on the stage. And would it have been better if she had not learnt her part? If she hadn’t rehearsed till exhaustion? Plot is not the main thing. When Balanchine toured the USSR at the beginning of sixties, he had been accused of formalism, of dances without a plot. And here I was, watching his chorographical creations in the Bolshoi, performed by the Theatre’s own troop of dancers. I liked it.

During the interval we went out to walk around a bit.
- I have to say, you don’t seem overjoyed to see me, - remarked my elegant companion.
- Sergey Filimonovich, you are too harsh. – Once, we had been in the habit of inventing different patronymics for one another. Quite often ‘Filimonovich’ was the only second name I used for him – it sounded so African in style, as though it were derived from the word lemon… lemon like the one growing near the kitchen window in Tunis, from which we picked gigantic yellow fruit all the year round for salads and, of course, for tea….  – I am very happy to see you after all these years. You look great. I am just waiting for an explanation as to why you’ve decided to rake up all these old ashes and do a thing like this.  I’m guessing that our chance meeting in that shop was simply a useful pretext.  Yes, somehow I think that’s right. – I looked him straight in the eye. 
- You’re talking rubbish, Sofia Pavlovna! You want me to find you a mirror? How very modest you are! – he joked – Or do you think evolution has entirely passed me by?  I’ve long since had my fill of long legs and Ukrainian accents.
- Oh, you’ve had enough already? How interesting! It must mean that you have tasted a lot of that sort of thing. You lived in the States for quite long a time, didn’t you? For about ten years? I heard a little but paid no attention to it. It all seemed so far away.
- You would have been better to have paid attention to it.
- Look what beautiful women are here tonight! – I looked in the direction of a beauty standing nearby, wearing long above the knee boots in blue suede.
- She is a real tamer. Sometimes you should listen to what you’re being told, Sofia Pavlovna, and not lash out with some inferiority complex.
- You’re wrong. - I got offended. We went back to our seats. My anonymous acquaintance from the imperial box had not left his seat and was still on the alert. All of a sudden he cried out:
- Hallo, Mihal Mihalich!
Sergey and I, surprised, looked at each other.
- He has done it at last! – grinned Sergey.
–  Where there’s a will there’s a way. He’s not wasting his time sitting there! He must be imagining that he is a grand prince, or a marshal or maybe even the Tsar. Perhaps he thought the woman next to him was the tsarina.  Should we write him a note – asking not to yell like that and make a fool of himself? – I enquired.
- I would send him flowers. He introduced himself quite spectacularly, - suggested Sergey.
- Some exotic flowers, decorated with a bow, - I agreed. – And a teddy bear as well. 

I hadn’t noticed that the lights had gone out.  Agon resumed.
- It’s a very powerful performance, Sonia, - Sergey whispered in my ear. – Feel the rhythm. – And he gently kissed me on my cheek. – In America I dreamed of watching it with you. – And he kissed me one more time.

Suzanne Farrell staged Agon in Moscow in 1999. I had seen her film – about her and her relationship with the master. She had been his last love and his Muse. That means that she had been the last Muse, whom he had loved and for whom he had created, and to whom he had devoted his ballets. She had been a very beautiful woman and a ballet-dancer. I remembered that my grandmother had always said: “Women become beauties, they are not born like that”. The film had been produced after his death, but real passion could be felt in it, as well as attachment to him, pride for his selectness.  Although she had tried to escape from him by marrying another man and working with B;jart, she had come back. Here in Moscow she described Agon as “a jump from the rock into the water”, intended for those wanting to make that leap and acquire self-confidence. She wanted to do everything in the proper way, and to remain marvelous.

* * *
- Do you know that Balanchine also wrote the ballet called Jewels? And I think he actually staged it with Arpels in New York? – We were leaving the theatre. Sergey was holding me by the arm.  Then he put my arm into his, which was more convenient. Slight wooden twinges from his perfume reached my senses.
- Yes... It’s rather far away... Are you by any chance suggesting a trip to Saint Petersburg? – I recalled that this ballet was also being performed in the Mariinsky Theatre.
- There are so many propositions I would love to make to you, Sofia Pavlovna, the divine. What a wonderful evening we have spent together! I am overwhelmed with both my own delight and other people’s, - with applause, with your deep eyes, with our reminiscences. Let’s go to ‘Pushkin’ for supper!
- And here is our transport! – I exclaimed. Karandash , Sergey’s driver, drove up to us in his silver limousine.
- Doesn’t he have a name? – I had asked before the performance. – Should I call him as Karandash? It sounds like some kind of nickname...
- Well, you can call him ‘Pencil’, if you want to use the translation of that nickname.
- And what is written in his passport? – I insisted.
- How on earth should I know... – Sergey shrugged his shoulders.
– He might be called Briefcase rather than Pencil.   You should check - I pressed on.
- I trust people, Sofia, my dear, I trust them. There are plenty of decent, disciplined people around.
- You are right. Good, kind people do surround us. – I insisted no more.
The restaurant was full of people, but they found a table on the second floor in the Library for us.
- I am so hungry. And it’s your fault, - Sergey reproached me.

A tall, handsome waiter in a long white apron brought the menu.
- You are welcome, Madam, - he addressed me in an old-fashioned way.
- A while ago you served venison meat with baked pear. That’s what I want, - said Sergey to the waiter, not looking at the menu. – Do you want to try it too? – he addressed me.
- Thank you, but I don’t eat meat. I want a double portion of strawberries with a touch of cream. And a cup of green tea to go with it. – Recently, I have developed a taste for strawberries. Before that, I ate only apples.
- Do you remember Pekarsky? – inquired Sergey.

I grew suspicious. Ilya had been with us in Africa.  To be more precise, he had been there at the same time, working as an assistant to the consul. He was a few years older than us, and in his spare time he had often escaped from the ‘old folks’ to join us.  I had liked him. Quiet jokes that he would murmur as though to himself, tinned food and other edible goods from the consulate shop, the French and sometimes even American magazines which he brought us, a privately owned automobile, a well-groomed appearance and a readiness to help the lazy students… these were the merits that made Ilya so welcome.  Living abroad at that time it was easy to see a potential informant in nearly everyone, but Ilya had managed to gain our confidence. In fact, we – the four girls and the three guys from different universities – had never even trusted each other much. This was the usual state of affairs. I knew who sneaked, and I suspected everyone else. And what of it – should we have stopped living? It was Ilya who reminded us of Papanov’s words from the Russian movie Byelorussian Terminal: “The commander of our regiment once said, ‘each wrinkle on your blanket is a loophole for the agents of Imperialism’”. As far as I remembered, Ilya had become friends with Sergey. But I didn’t know what had happened afterwards. I lost touch with both of them.

- Does Ilya Petrovich want to meet up with me as well? Let’s ask him to join us in Petersburg.
- I always suspected the pair of you. I remember that during the May Day meeting he accompanied you and Makarova from the glade to the cottage of the Attach; of Culture, whose wife had gone to Moscow to give birth.  There was some composer hanging around as his guest.
- Oh yes... You cannot hide a grand piano in the bushes… - I drawled.
- Well, he was always hanging around you dressed in white Lacoste trousers that I could only dream of, chirping: “Sardine, you won’t regret it! Think, piano music for four hands! We’ll drink cold champagne! Leave this miserable shashlik alone! Off we go! Follow me!”
- These memories really haven’t faded for you, have they?  It’s great!
- On your way there you smashed the ambassadorial BMW, knocked down some fellah on his old banger and damaged the fence on your way into the residence. Krishkin had a narrow escape that time.  The rumors reached his wife.
- Well, wasn’t a problem for us…. Krishkin always envied Pekarsky. As far as I remember, when they sat down with that composer to play Beatles music for four hands, Makarova asked them to play "Hey Jude", - Krishkin blushed, he was standing there, obviously hating it in spite of the cognac he had already drunk.
- And what else happened? –Sergey seemed nervous

They brought us the strawberries and the venison with baked pear.
- Bon appetit, Filimonich, - I said.
- And what comes next? – asked Sergey again.
- You and I quarreled with you then, as you probably remember, because of the lecture notes. You spilled tomato juice on my workbook and claimed that the half of the notes were missing. And you yourself had no notes on syntax at all – not a single line. Makarova told you to pay her 20 dinars just for the last three lectures. Have you forgotten it? And later on she also complained that you stayed the night with us, and that you spoke to Americans at the Institute. It was prohibited to talk to anyone, as you remember.
- You’ll make fun of me for this, but I met up Pete from our Grammar group later on.
- Where did you see him? In the States?
- We met in Kyoto. And later on, in New York . By the way, he’s in jewelry business, just like you.
- You don’t say?! Fat old Pete! In the jewelry business! Jesus Christ, that’s incredible! – I almost choked on my berries.
- He even asked about you a couple of times, - Sergey continued calmly.
- And what did he ask about?
- Well, about practically everything...
- Are you joking?! – This was the last thing I expected to hear - And what did you tell him about me?
- I told him that I didn’t know anything. They sent me abroad “to establish friendly relations” after I had graduated from the University. You married some guy again...
- Yes, that’s the only news worth telling about a woman, - I retorted.

And then I remembered. Once, in the winter after the New Year, Filimonich and I, Peter and Alicia (another American  from our group), had opted to go to the city market (the locals called it “suk”). Sergey invited Ilya to go with him, for safety’s sake.   We met at one of the entrances to these endless labyrinths of Arabian folk craftwork mixed Indian, Turkish and Italian styles, as well as some other odds and ends. As far as I remember we had been assigned to write a composition entitled ‘My perception of the City of Tunis’ or something like that, and we decided to use this chance to stroll to the market. We agreed with the Americans that we would pretend to have met by chance – and in that case, why should we flee from each other as if we were hounds of ideology?  The story also went that we had likewise met Pekarsky all of a sudden, while he was choosing a little handicraft carpet for himself, depicting a white house against a blue background, and a clay plate with a similar design.  All of us, young, turbulent and eager as we were, craved normal communication, chat about the USA and the USSR – we liked to ask one another tricky questions and to argue over which country was worse to live in. Alicia was no fool – she was an active career woman, dreaming of becoming a diplomat and setting the flag of victory on another peak of American feminism. She didn’t like to have any courtesies addressed to her that might emphasize her femininity. Thus nobody would give their hand to her, nobody would let her walk through a door first, and nobody ever carried her heavy bags. And she liked it this way… Even Pekarsky played her game; when we sat down at a coffee table with one stool too few, he told her: “There’s a vacant stool over there, so go and get it”. Alicia went and fetched it quite obediently. She used to wear unisex clothes, and she didn’t wear make up or nail varnish – but she did pluck her eyebrows.  I was definitely not mistaken about that!
- What does she usually do for personal hygiene during her period? – Pekarsky inquired.
- You can find out. Make some allusion to your primitive Soviet morals, apologize. And come and tell us what you know. – Filimonich advised him.

But all the same it was fun to be with Alicia, and Pete was certainly no fool for having befriended her.   
- I’m not sleeping with her, - he was always finding excuses for himself.
- Well, nobody thinks you are - replied Sergey. – She will have everything her way.
And Alicia was casting glances at Ilya. She was even helping him to look for his plate with a house on it. 
- Il, - she asked him, – What if there’s a camel near the house, like on this one?
- Impossible, - replied Pekarsky. – It should be just a white house and a blue sea.

Without realising it, we had drifted towards the jewellers’ stalls. Everything was bright and shining there, smelling of fragrances. The sellers touted in every language. They had no idea that we could understand Arabic, all five of us. I was looking at the gold necklaces in surprise, as they were so enormous that their weight looked as though it could damage the wearer’s neck vertebrae. And at that point, Pete and I became the focus of attention.  It was clear that the others were not on the same wavelength as us.
   
First he asked me to try on ring earrings with pendants, and then he chose some coral beads. Oh my God! What wonderful beads they were! It can happen like that at the market, when everything has become just a general mess of sparkles and multicolor, when your legs feel tired, when you do not want anything because you’ve almost stopped seeing the things around you –you are overwhelmed by something magnificently beautiful!
- Pete, how did you know to choose these beads? – I exclaimed.
- I’ve been aware of things like that since my childhood, Sophie. You know, my mother would take me to boutiques all over the world with her, starting from when I was six.  I have seen a lot of things. You can find wonderful red corals here in Tunis, and at a very reasonable price. Look at the mirror! – He turned the mirror to me. – Now pull up your hair, in this way. Alicia won’t listen to me. Your neck... You have got an ideal neck for the necklace. And little ears, too.

For a split second my imagination transported me, an ordinary Soviet girl, who had never seen any decent shop in her life and never been to a Western country, to some mythical shop decorated with pink velour, mahogany and crystal. Then I thought of Adriano Celentano and Anthony Quinn in the “Bluff: storia di truffe e di imbroglioni” movie. Yes, that was it. In that movie they were swindling someone at the jewelry shop. What was it called? ‘Van Cleef and…’ something...

- Do you watch European movies, Pete? - Overwhelmed, I just wanted to get on with the conversation.
- Sometimes I do. My mother’s of Italian origin, you know.
- Oh really? – I was surprised. It was impossible to think of him as half Italian. Or so I’d thought till then. At that moment, I looked at him with new eyes. He was a little bit plump on the plump side. But his face was pleasant, and he was well dressed.  He was wearing some medallion on a black string. I had seen it earlier but not really given it much thought.
 
- What are you doing here? I’ve been looking for you everywhere, - Sergey, coming into the shop, was happy to see us.
- Have you found the damned still life for Pekarsky? – I changed the topic.
- You should ask Alicia about that. I lost you all. I’ve had enough shopping. It’s high time we went to write that composition.
We did not go into any of the other shops in the market after that. Everybody was tired, so we said good-bye to one another and went home.

If you understand the status quo of the eighties, you will know that ours were no harmless pranks.  The things we did on that day could have resulted in highly undesirable consequences. All of us could receive reprimands from the representatives of the Komsomol organization, and Pekarsky could receive a reprimand from the representatives of the Soviet Communist Party.  They could even prevent us from traveling abroad.  It was really dangerous to enter into direct contact with Americans.   But nobody informed any officials about our movements. The three of us began to trust one another more, and naturally we didn’t stick to the rules. Especially because my compatriots were mostly reluctant to go to the Institute, and obviously everything feels rather different when there are no witnesses about.

There was a shabby little caf; at the Institute. You could buy snacks there during breaks – a can of coke or a cup of coffee, buns, pizzas with tomato paste and olives.  I remember that there always were sunflower seed husks on the floor. Lots of the students would munch on them because they were so cheap, and because the fact you had to crack them made them last a long time.  They were sold in little paper-bags; it was very nice. Well, to tell the truth, I’ve never eaten better sunflower seeds or potatoes than the ones I ate in Tunis.  But we would only eat sunflower seeds at home in the kitchen, and after the scholarship we also bought almonds and hazel-nuts.

Pete was always hanging about, drinking coffee and chatting with Tunisians. Sometimes he even spoke Italian.
- Privet, Sophie, - he addressed me in Russian. – How are you doing?

Filimonich had taught him that. He also could say “I love you” (‘Ya tebya lyublyu”), “don’t love” (“ne lyublyu”), “A girl” (“devushka”) and “A booty” (“popa”). He couldn’t remember the word for ‘a kiss' (“potseluy”). “What the hell?! How can such an important word be so long and complicated?” - he protested. He also hated the words for “Hello” (“zdravstvuyte”) and “nothing” (“nichego”).
- Hi, Pete! What a wonderful sweater that is!

After our trip to the market I began to pay attention to his clothes and to intuitively understand that he was dressed expensively and well. At that time we didn’t know much about style and fashion, but we were beginning to get a feeling for such things.
- Mum sent me a parcel. This one’s supposed to be for Alicia. But you know what she’s like: how could she possibly go to the Institute wearing cashmere? In fact, it’s actually a little bit tight on her.   Let me give it to you, take it. – He handed over a black paper packet with a silk bow on it. – The package is Tunisian – couldn’t find anything better.

It was a silly situation. I didn’t know what to do. He was an American, and it was all very awkward. Just nonsense.
He saw that I was hesitating.
- And what present should I give you, Pete?
- How should I know? Just think of something. It’s not like I’m giving you panties or a saucepan.

At that moment it dawned on me: It was Saint Valentine’s Day today!  Goodness gracious, I thought. What shall I say to Sergey? And how shall I explain it to the girls? Shall I tell them I bought it for myself, with, I don’t know, six scholarships or something?  And what on earth is in this parcel? I’m snookered!
- Do you think before you do things? – I asked.  But I didn’t want to offend him.
- You’re the reason I’m still studying at this sodding Institute.  I want you to know that... that you have more strength and willpower than these uncombed feminists. Just be a real woman, the only one. Everyone has their own mission. The main thing is to realize that in time.
I blushed. The parcel was hot in my hands.
- Would you like a cup of coffee? It’s kind of awkward standing here like this.

There was a sweater in it, better than any garment I’d ever touched, and the coral beads from the market

Later I learnt, that Pete came from a family of very prosperous bankers.  He had studied political science at Yale University, and he had come to Tunis to visit an acquaintance of his father, who was the US ambassador.  He had stayed by mere chance – for the sake of improving his health and in order to overcome some traumatic experience of his own. He was living for his soul and was paying for it: life is never a fairytale, whether you’re living in Manhattan or in Sokolniky. He had studied Arabic at some time in his childhood, in Jordan, where his family had lived for about three years. There he was, the oldest son of a billionaire, and he was interested in me. He was the kind of man you dreamt about! But I didn’t think of him in this way. Anyway, we were afraid of our supervisors. And he certainly was one of their chief targets, making me a target by association. You couldn’t get off without show downs, which was exactly what happened next.

- Do you really think, my dear, that we will let you flirt with Americans? – Comrade Alabyan asked me, having called me to his office on the first floor of our Embassy.
I felt dizzy, as though I were on the carousel in Gorky park.
- He will try to hire you, and as soon as you come to your senses, you will jump off the cliff near the walls of Carthage. You are not only a fool, but you are also ready to endanger all of your relatives.
I saw black dots.  His dumb-witted speech registered in waves in my mind, like Ayvazovsky’s pictures.
-  Well, tell me, then. I’m not joking. – He made a strict and haughty face which made my tongue feel numb.
-  What should I tell you, Alexander Eduardovich? Are your asking me about Peter Kent? – I whispered.
- Is there also some John? – asked the secretary of the Party Organization.
- He studies in our group in Grammar. Alicia is also in the group. She is an American too. Nobody is hiring me, nobody has asked me any suspicious questions, - I said in a horrible, hoarse voice.
- You should not be making contact!- retorted comrade Alabyan. – This is your final warning! Next time, you will be arrested and flown back to Moscow. You should not even borrow a pen from them! Is that clear? You’d be better to write with your fingers! The less you hang about at the university, the more soundly you can sleep. We’ve spoilt you anyway – you have made a bordello out of your apartment. I should also deal with that other guy of yours, Pekarsky.  You have got totally out of hand! Come here!
- Where? – I stammered, almost fainting.
- Come here!
I came up to the table, at which he was sitting.
- Come nearer!
My legs were numb, made from foam, plastic, wood – or whatever material they turn to on such occasions. I remember that he unzipped his fly, and then I finally fainted for real.


I choked with water and coughed.
- What’s the matter, Sonia? – asked Sergey, frightened.
- I just choked, sorry. Nothing serious... everything’s ok.
There were even more people in the restaurant by then. All the tables were occupied. It was noisy, the dishes were clinking. This place, ‘Pushkin’, is really interesting. It’s a crazy restaurant! Probably one of the best in Moscow. And it’s as busy as a beehive, even at 1 am.
A waiter wearing an apron came in with a tray, on which was a bottle of French champagne and a bouquet of white roses.
- Our guests have sent these to you. Welcome! I will put the flowers in a vase and bring them back to the table, if you like.
I stared at Sergey in astonishment. He was smiling.
- Did you do this?
- No, not me, - answered Sergey, still smiling.
- Which guests? – I asked the waiter.
- At that table over there. – He indicated a table at the far end of the hall.
I turned round. What a day it was! An older, slimmer Pete was approaching me. He was followed by Pekarsky, who had hardly changed at all (he wasn’t even bald), dressed in a yellow American-style tie.
“There are so many of them, and I am alone”, - The thought crossed my overwhelmed mind.



















4

Using his status in Tunis Pekarsky got acquainted with the local bourgeoisie and political elite, two groups which are generally very closely connected in such countries. A family-member’s political success entailed immediate business success for all his relatives, however distant, and greatly contributed to the prosperity of his friends and acquaintances. It is quite easy to guess at the motives of Ilya’s actions, but whether or not his strategy was successful I cannot say for sure. Notwithstanding his relative youth, he had some authority among the Consulate representatives, and they allowed him to do a lot of things which were prohibited for others. They were surely taking into account his father’s contacts and long-term diplomatic activity in Western Europe, and in my opinion, also the connections of his maternal uncle, who was a professor of physics. And what wonderful son he was! Prince of the dreams of fellow Komsomol students and young teachers. At that time he was the embodiment of a member of a high-ranking family of Soviet princes and naturally, he knew it well enough.

I remember that he had become close friends with Suad, a business woman in her fifties and the wife of some minister of education or of agriculture – I am not sure which.  She was very fond of her two sons, handsome, lazy guys who made active use of the family finances. Her husband was a politician busy with his career; they saw each other rarely, and had not held any special attraction for each other for many years. She was the owner of a villa in Sousse, which was occasionally occupied by her children: one of the sons sometimes stayed there with his Moroccan wife and his little son, the other, the most handsome man of the whole family, would entertain there his numerous French girlfriends. At that time a man could catch a lot of French girls, especially in spring. They came there to get jobs in the hotels or tourist agencies, or simply to look for opportunity; sometimes, actors and singers also came to live with him.  Russian and Ukrainian women were not yet able to travel about with the ease of these French girls, and so a similar field of activity for our mademoiselles was practically uncultivated.

At the beginning of June, Suad decided to celebrate her birthday and invited Pekarsky to the private Swiss club on Karkana Island.  Ilya said that he would come with friends, and invited me and Sergey to go with him. They were probably both leading me on – for all I know, Sergey might have been in cahoots with Pekarsky – but it certainly wasn’t chance that led them to ask me to join them.  Refusal was out of the question; I was sick and tired of the limits imposed on our contact with others, and of being confined to certain rooms and places.  It was even forbidden to go to the cinema or to the beach. Sometimes they organized trips to the seaside in the old UAZ cars, packed with people and without any air conditioning.  Having made this trip once, squashed into the car along with wives of the officials of the second delegation, listening to their artless talk about sales and the latest knitting pattern (in Tunis they sold cheap mohair, and these women diligently knitted clothes for their children and husbands to wear during the long and frosty Russian winters), I had firmly resolved not to waste any more of my spare time like that.  You couldn’t even spread out a towel more than two meters from the party, or to plunge into the water without having told your worried neighbors where you were going.  On top of this you had to answer questions such as ‘Do you still miss your Motherland?’, and on the way back, sing  ‘Katiusha’ in unison (I have never had anything against the military songs – at Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s concert devoted to V-day, at which he had performed only military songs, I had felt tears standing in my eyes along with many other people present). The whole consulate staff liked the song about ‘Gena the Crocodile’, and the Russian song ‘A beauty from Moldova’. And if you do not like it, ask yourself what’s the matter and try to make yourself believe that you still enjoy it.  I had always thought cordially about my city – my mother, my father, the Institute, my childhood friends were all there, and in your twenties you still have a lot of illusions and a lot of angst, not fully expressed and experienced. Why should your irresistible wish to see the world be considered a crime and why should you surround yourself with people, who drink vodka in order to be patriotic – is that really a humane approach? In such an environment a trip to some private Swiss club on some island was as good as a winning lucky lottery ticket. And I didn’t care, whether that would tell on the rest of my life. One month was left until our return to Moscow.

Suad’s driver came in a spacious Volvo to drive us to the party venue. I should mention that it was a fairly long way, and that the final leg of the journey was by ferry.

 Now I hardly bat an eyelid at the sight of a five star hotel in the Mediterranean: I have had enough of trips, of visiting, sightseeing, drinking fresh juice and swimming in light blue swimming pools, admiring the topless beauties and the loved-up gay sportsmen.  But at that time no Eastern European had ever appeared in this club. Local people were looking at us with interest similar to the interest we felt looking at them. We probably disappointed them, since, like themselves, we had two feet and two hands, and reasonably intellectual faces.  And, as we were a team, all looking out for one another as we had been taught, we were not shy. 

The sea on that island was simply unique, the sort of beauty you rarely see: it was warm, transparent, very shallow – coming just above the knee – and sparkling as if with stars. Much later, when I was sailing along the seacoast of Crete in a friend’s yacht, we stayed in a very shallow bay, the ankle-deep water of which was practically hot, and if felt as though you could walk on the water.   And this vaguely resembled that Tunisian island. It was said that the princess Diana used to go there... It was such a wonderfully strange feeling: because the sea was so shallow the effect was such that even quite far from the coast, you were walking on solid land, as though you were more than human.  You felt placid, serene, as though you were forgiving everyone everything, dreaming your dreams and climbing higher and higher.  There is a similar, sudden sensation in holy places, near a monastery, for example, where women are not usually permitted to go.   But real miracles have nothing to do with your gender, or other things like that.  People do invent strange things sometimes.  It is mostly male weakness that leads men to throw stones at women.  But you cannot suppress your natural desires – it’s better to strive for harmony. If you want to, you can find plenty of lust and eroticism even in prayer, and no hijab could ever come up to the expectations laid upon it. There was a year’s imprisonment for any woman who dared to set foot on Mount Athos in Greece – this not only strikes me as unmerciful, but if the monks were that easily distracted by the women, how much was their communication with God actually worth? Well all right, let them find lonely places for themselves, let them buy real estate all over the world and meditate about spending their money and making repairs to their monastic cells. Somehow, this will do for us.  We will visit the places that are not prohibited to us, and save our souls as well as we can.

The three of us settled down in a fairly spacious bungalow equipped with all modern conveniences, and a sea view. The golden coastline began right outside the door, and breakfast was served on the beach itself under bamboo tents: we would eat watermelon, yoghurt, fresh bread, honey and coffee. Those three days of organized bourgeois treat made me happy. I had an immense desire to be a naughty, irresponsible little girl and not to think of anything but pleasure, at least for a short time. I like water, water sports, boat trips – everything to do with water, really, and there I enjoyed the fairylike sea and having everything you might want on tap.  I put on a yellow swimsuit and rushed into the water. A little wooden boat was bobbing near the coast. The sea was warm, transparent, salty, endless, free, green, serene, kind, intoxicating... It was pure delight!

Ilya was already sitting in the boat:
- Let’s swim out and look for pearls!
- For fools, you mean!
What strange people they were! Weren’t they tired after the trip?
There was a motor attached to the boat. I wrapped up in a green pareo, dyed using the Indonesian batik technique where the fabric is knotted and plunged into the dye, giving you beautiful lines. Several similar pareos were in the bungalow along with the towels. Ilya handed me a straw hat.
- What’s our route? – I wanted to stay on the beach, but I obeyed him and sat down into the boat.
– You can do anything, from steering a boat to doing business, I said. - So what’s the business, then, Pekarsky? – I plunged my hands into the water, observing the sea bottom: there were so many things to see, each little stone was quite visible. – And why isn’t Filimonich sailing with us? – I splashed him with water from my wet hands. – Have we brought Suad a present?

- Our very presence is valuable, oh much-respected Sofia Terentyevna. – And he wiped the drops of seawater away from my face. – It’s a shame you’re leaving, I’ve grown attached to you. You could even say that we’ve become friends. I’m attached to Peter, too. He’s a kind, openhearted fellow... What’s more there was no class antagonism at all between us. I am only telling this to you and this puddle – He indicated the endless surface of the sea with a nod. – We cannot hate the rich, yet we Soviet people are sort of beyond their social hierarchies. Go and talk to some worker in Oklahoma, pop into some little bar and let them see if they are able to understand where you have come from. You cannot get away from your education and your brain. And you cannot hide these things either. Just imagine what would happen if somebody changed the political regime in our wonderful country? With Soviet people still living there? Have you ever thought about it? Doctors and nurses would no longer have equal salaries, as they do now.  And scientists would be paid for their discoveries. And what would happen to the political toadies?
 
- Pekarsky, you’re making me want to jump off your multideck yacht. I am not ready to be accused as a dissident, or to ask our dear Pete for political asylum. Have I made myself clear enough? – I was not afraid of him. I thought that he only wanted to check up on my political ideas: up until what temperature dîes my inner thermometer still function? – Don’t spoil the holiday for me. I’m not an informer. My relationship with Alabyan is very bad, as you know. – I had told them about the fainting incident.
- Well, there is nobody to inform now, at any rate... – Ilya smiled meaningfully.
- What’s the matter? Doesn’t Alexander Eduardovich receive any callers? Or maybe he’s having repairs done to his office? – I adjusted the hat, which was a little tight. I have quite a big head and most hats are the wrong size for me.
- He was fond of playing tennis with his pretty, sporty lady friend. By the way, it’s rare to meet a childless couple among the officials of his position. – Ilya was almost being serious and I pricked up my ears. – You know, they cooked dinner, left it, still warm, on the stove... put on their jogging suits, took rackets in their hands, and headed straight for the airport...
 - They’ve left for America?  Is it true, Pekarsky?
- You are brilliant, Sardine! What more can I tell you? He’s a serious sportsman. 
- That’s incredible! I wonder what will happen now?

It was indeed great news, surprising and frightening all at once.  A wonderful ending for my first trip abroad! I was probably far too young; my life experiences were just being formed and a lot of things were happening for the first time, as I have already said – a lot of things I was unable to foresee at all, and I often took things far too literally.  I lent money without making sure when I would get it back, took up the cudgels for the poor who were not really all that poor, kept my word (well, I still have that last habit, but now I make fewer promises). No, it’s not this way. I have not changed all that much because we are born “ready made”; but I have become a better judge of character, and learned to hide my attitudes from people. This was a difficult point for a long time. They made me use caution. I thought that I would never pay off, but over time, enlightenment comes together with the understanding that it is necessary to determine right and wrong for yourself, to discover your soul, to overcome insignificant temptations, envy and arrogance... But nobody in their twenties understands this much about life...

- It’s quite logical to suppose that they will delegate his successor - answered Ilya.
- Would any of the local officials suit the position? They have missed Zmey Gorynych , - I gave a sigh. ‘Take care not to get impaled ourselves’ - that’s probably what the official had thought.
- I think that our glorious Soviet party will manage to muster the personnel for such a small African country, - Ilya said calmly, looking behind me.
- Pekarsky, you have been infected here.
I pulled pareo over my knees; even though the sun was beginning to go west, the heat was still rather oppressive.
- It’s about time, - he responded, - as my wonderful trunks are getting a little tight for me. – He took off his white shirt, switched off the motor and jumped into the water.
- I appreciate it! – I waved my hand at him. – And where is Sergey? You must have tied him to a palm-tree, - I smiled.
- Suad took him away. – And he began swimming in circles round me again, although the sea was so shallow that it was difficult for him to do so.
- Look, Ilya Zaharich, won’t they cut off our heads when we get back to the city of golden cupolas ?  What do you think? – I asked him a question that had just occurred to me.  – Is it ok that we are speaking Arabic? – It’s nicer like that.
- Once I spoke to my father about the three of us... on the telephone, - Ilya half-started to tell me.
- You mean, they won’t cut off our heads? – I asked, but I didn’t want to press the point. He might get it wrong. – I want a drink... You know I think that Alabyan is a traitor. He has probably given somebody away, the old devil. Couldn’t he have left otherwise? During some holiday trip... Or was the situation urgent? Was he summoned?...
I was thinking about all of this when Ilya climbed back onto the boat, dried himself with a towel as well as he could, and put on his shirt.  We began to move again.
- The island is obviously quite a small one. Look, they spread nets over there, - I showed to him. – Do you think they fish here, too?
- We’re going back now, calm down.

This sea trip struck me as a little strange, but I remembered it, of course. We arrived at some little bay and walked barefoot from there to the swimming pool, approaching it from the other side.   It wasn’t crowded, but there were a handful of people.  The staff were stringing up party lights, music was playing (a Michael Jackson song, I think), the tables were being covered in bright tablecloths.   Then I noticed the semicircle of letters ‘ÍÀÐÐÓ BIRTHDAY, SUAD’ – the party preparations were underway. 
- I’d rather stay in my swimsuit and pareo, but I would like to comb my hair and to put on flip-flops or something. I can’t walk barefoot – although it’s exotic, of course... Africa...
- Wasn’t it you who wanted a drink? – Ilya responded to my complaining. – And here are our friends!
The whole of our worthy company was sitting at some distance from us – that is, Pete, Alicia, Filimonich and a middle-aged man, who was in a pareo just like myself.  All the others were in swimsuits.

Could he be some American ambassador, over here for a holiday? I compared myself with a girl from the Red Army, who, brought to the Ball of Denikin, or some raider during the Great Patriotic war, who has found herself in Hitler’s bunker. I had hardly recovered from the shock of Alabyan’s escape, and one month previously, Nikitin, the Aeroflot representative, had hanged himself (or was hanged by others) in his personal office. I began to realize that my father was not all that influential. So there was nobody to help me out, and Sergey, the bastard, hadn’t warned me that I might be made to write a report for some state bodies explaining why I had gone to the party without having warned any official in the Consulate – having simply trusted Ilya Pekarsky, whose position was inferior and whose authority was quite limited... So I felt pretty depressed.   

- Privet! – yelled Pete in Russian. – Kak dela ?
Alicia was sitting with her legs crossed in a snow-white swimsuit, with a red pedicure and a chain round her right ankle. All I could do was to pinch myself and call on the Holy Virgin to come to my aid; for her to be gracious, and send me back to the city. Pete was sitting in blue trunks, without his medallion, and with a fairly good suntan. He stood up to greet me and I liked his long feet. Sometimes it happens like that.  I flashed my eyes at Sergey.
- This is Sophie, she specializes in stylistics of Arabic. - Pete introduced me to the man.
- Glad to meet a Russian girl. I am Michael, an old friend of Suad’s. – He stood up, offering his rattan chair to me.  Then he took another one and sat down nearby. - She has always loved being around young people. You cannot imagine how we celebrated her birthday in Indonesia! I wish you had seen it! – He went on – And there were even elephants in Kenya.
- And now Russians, – I untied the upper knot of the pareo and stood up to take it off. – She has got a wonderful imagination, - I stated.
Pete smiled.
- Look, you don’t know what’s planned for the evening, - Michael said.
Jesus Christ! – the thought crossed my restless mind. – How can I avoid it!
Alicia was sitting on the opposite side from me. She bent forward and whispered:
- Sophie, I like your breasts so much... you have got pink nipples...
- Can you see them? – I asked.
- Oh yes, quite conspicuous, - intervened Pete.
- Are you referring my superb intellectual potential, dear? – I noticed his roving glance.
- Who is so ‘dear’ over there? – Filimonich joined in at last.
- Oh, you of course!.. – I cast a wonderfully chilling glance at him.

At ten o’clock everybody headed for an “Old Roman” Amphitheatre. It was impossible to say who had erected it on the Island, but in all probability it was the same architect who had designed the bungalows, bamboo tents, restaurants, swimming pool and surrounding landscape. For obvious political reasons I had no suitable clothes for the festive occasion, and could not have dreamed of taking Pete’s sweater to the island.  So I took another clean pareo from the bungalow, changed the yellow swimsuit for a light pink one, untied my hair and with considerable effort, brushed it neat.  I put on a shell necklace and, naturally, did not forget to apply a lipstick.

The show began. Suad had invited French artists: there was a burlesque, popular songs were sung, the MC told jokes and played tricks, blowing up condoms that burst and butterflies (artificial, I think) flew out.  Everybody was laughing at his jokes, Ilya was interpreting as well as he could, Sergey was not there. I didn’t ask any questions – my goal was simply to survive until the end and then escape to the city. Then Pete sat down close to me.
- Now they will serve the cake with a surprise. Relax, dear. Learn to be free.
So nice! - I thought, and became even more nervous. But youth’s vacant mind is wonderful. I had no way out – it was an island, obviously surrounded by the sea.   Well, damn it all! I remembered about Alabyan again. Where had all these people come from? The amphitheatre was almost full. And what if the orgies begin right now? My scared Russian head was bursting with absurd thoughts.   ‘I will yell: “Workers of the world, unite!” - in every language.  Or recite  Mayakovsky’s poetry….
- I don’t think you like it here, Sophie.  Shall we escape? – Pete was insisting.
- Look! – I took him by the hand and looked into his eyes.
- What, baby? – He bent forward with his face close to mine.
- Take me out of here. Right now. To Tunis. I will be so grateful to you.
- Do you want to go home?
- I have wanted to go home for a long time. And you are the only one who can help me. Petechka , darling, please...

When I called him Petechka, Pete’s heart melted like an ice-cream. He stroked me on the head, patronizingly. He was very understanding.
- I will take you.
It was a fantastic escape, just like in the movies. He hired a boat and we began to move in silence. I left a note in the bungalow: ‘Enjoy the holiday. See you. Please don’t be worried, guys, since I am safe in good company’.  Thank God there were no mobile phones then, otherwise it couldn’t have worked.

On the land Pete took a taxi and I went my way. He gave me three hundred dinars –an immense sum of money at that time – and kissed me on the mouth. I remembered that American kiss for a long time.

I also remembered my journey to Tunis in the taxi. I was thinking about my past life, and about the future. In my mind the final revolution was taking place, however insignificant my thoughts might have seemed to the outside world.   I knew almost nothing about dissidents and daring writers or film directors; my own opposition to the system was just hatching out, cheeping feebly – but the animal fear I had felt on that Tunisian island, when I was absolutely innocent, having committed no crime, having said nothing wrong – this had cracked the shell of the dull, servile, ideologically nourished creature I had been.

What will I do when I return to Moscow? What goals will I set for myself? Why should I be politically engaged in everything I do? In a year I will get my diploma – but so what? Will I work for the ‘Voice of Moscow’ on Arabic radio in defense of Palestinians? Will I specialize in the Marxist-Leninist Philology? Will I pick up language teaching using the citations from “Pravda” newspaper as examples? Or will I work for one of the consulates with somebody like Alabyan? What can I do within limits of my profession?

In the end I did not become Arabist. I almost gave up my studies completely, struggling on till I got my diploma with incredible difficulty.  I felt lost for a very long time; I did not exist at that time. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I got married. I was deprived of Komsomol membership. I left the country, but I didn’t really get anywhere. I hoped for new and better life in all honesty, sincerity and confidence. How many people like myself were in a similar situation? Was it the whole generation? And was it only one generation? I was lucky enough to live in Europe for ten years – not an especially luxurious life, I drove an ordinary car and dressed in ordinary jeans, working at random places – it was all the same to me. I wanted a break like that for myself. I had no idea how long it could last. I became disappointed in my husband. Love is nice enough when everything else is nice, when you know your position in life, and who you are in society.  He was no ally for me. He even laughed at me - my education in Moscow University and I myself would be only worth something if I was given the chance to become the part of the system, in the right place, and if I was able to work in accordance with somebody’s directions. Once, I almost agreed with him.  I read a lot. I read everything new I could find and everything I had failed to read earlier.

And then the nineties began....















































5

I probably like autumn so much because I am an early riser. I don’t even really long for the universally-awaited summer.  I like both November and December, the latter because it is so festive in its autumnal way; it isn’t quite a winter month.  Before New Year, the time flows by quickly and interestingly, and then life splashes like a gigantic wave onto the coast and real winter sets in, with its holidays, skis, winter vacations, children’s New Year celebrations, the new collections in the boutiques, crisp snow, militiamen in their felt boots… the march of time slows down.  Everybody longs for winter. And so it is year in year out. Of course the season is just decoration, a background, a quiet accompaniment without any direct relation to real life. As a little girl, I used to think that the present was a discovery of the world – of a new opera, a factory with pipes, a grand tour around the globe. And the birds sang for themselves and for the stupid lazybones who stayed still to listen to them. Then you understand that some stupid guy who has listened to the birds too much has painted a picture called “Morning in bald mountains” and has become a well-known celebrity. He has found the answers, he has seen our life as it is. With no beer and with no TV set. Or even with a TV-set. But this isn’t what I want to talk about.

It was the beginning of autumn - September, the prince of the months, still warm, but definitely quite a mature month of the year.  It was the most beautiful season. I was walking along Kazanova Street in Paris to the Louvre, to visit an antiquarian Salon. I was wearing my favorite gray jacket. I was walking along and thinking that that evening I would be alone in this magnificent city at the beginning of autumn, and that it was a pity. I stopped at a chocolate shop, licked my lips and turned onto the Rue de Rivoli Street. The chocolate was delicious. I gave three Americans directions to the Opera House. They had faultlessly identified whom to ask. I know where the Opera House is.

There was a new mezzanine at the 22nd antiquarian Salon, in which they were exhibiting new jewelry. I approached the Carrousel du Louvre entrance. There were a lot of people in it. I rode down in escalator, passed by the upturned Glass Pyramid, showed my ID card and headed for Van Cleef & Arpels – or to be more precise, to the boutique specially opened at biennale. “Cartier” boutique was situated nearby, looking like an elder brother: a little bit bigger in size, more pompous, of course, with such a polite, reserved, proud appearance, characteristic of “Cartier”. That’s how it looks in the morning, at least.  But so far as single objects for impartial admiration are concerned, in the terms of price, historical value and jewelry perfection, Van Cleef & Arpels has its own merits to boast of. Nobody can deny it. Van Cleef & Arpels has no equal in artistic energy, carat size and virtuosity. At the marketing meetings, what I had enjoyed most was observing the group of designers, who would sit in a bunch at the back, watching our reactions.  They had been really young, wearing golden boots, flamboyant, a little bit defiant. Well, the creator and the seller are the main actors in this network; the bureaucracy that joins the two is something like a District Party Committee, or maybe a City Party Committee. Carpets, allowances, Volga cars, reports, newspaper editorials, the TV news program Vremya, labor medals. You cannot get along without administration. I smiled to think of where these reminiscences were occurring to me.   If I had been told in my Komsomol youth that I would stand in Louvre, holding in my hand Elizabeth Taylor’s diamond brooch (costing half a million dollars), I would not have believed it.   The thought would have been so far from even my boldest daydreams and fantasies.  In Louvre, however, the brooch was quite real. So were gigantic Columbian emeralds, Kashmirian sapphires, a light blue diamond and “Midsummer Night’s Dream” – the latest collection of high-art jewelry. If it were possible I would ask the Almighty to make it so that Shakespeare himself had seen it. He still inspires 21st century! Titania with diamond wings! “Gone!”

At about two o’clock I went downstairs to the first floor to stroll about the antiquarian fair. Thank God I am not a professional, otherwise I am sure that the immenseness of the visual impressions and the emotions they invoked would have left me quite breathless.  There were pictures, furniture, dishes, carpets and the most wonderful candlesticks. The sight of candlesticks in movies, apartments, museums always strikes a chord in my soul. For some reason, music from the Nutcracker accompanies this impression. Why is it so? Who knows, probably some elemental forces at work.  Fire is one of the elements of nature, symbolizing riot, power, mystery, excitement, and miracle. My feet got tired and I returned to the boutique.

- Well, how are you doing? – Paul, a nice fellow who was a salesman in the Vend;me shop, working alongside me, met me with a shining face. – Have you found us a Russian collector? 
- You shouldn’t be waiting for one and he’ll come along all by himself.  – I had been invited expressly for the purpose of meeting Russian collectors, but I had not come across anyone I knew, or any strangers I might approach, either.   No Russians were to be seen at all.
– Biennale was quite nice, - I told him my impression. – And how are you?
- Damn these lacquer butterflies! – This cheap jewelry, even though decorated with diamonds, was no deal. – And fascinated the public. Everything’s quite quiet so far, - he reported.
- Have you had dinner? – I asked.
- Jacques is coming soon – He was our boss. – He is looking for package; you know we ran short of cartons as usual. Should I go and buy some cakes, do you want one?
- An ;clair, please. Thank you, dear.
- An ;clair? – Jacques was standing behind me and giggling.
- You think in such unusual ways, Jacques! It’s not for nothing that you’re the boss around here. – I slightly patted him on the shoulder.
- It’s because of your blouse. It’s reminding me of my youth, - he drawled sweetly.
- When you were still fond of women? – I responded, imitating his tone.
- Well, no. At that time I was fond of cakes.
- Get another ;clair for him, Paul. I will prolong the pleasant moment for you, boss.
- I am leaving for London right now. Have to visit some Arabian queen. We sold a casket to her, I’m taking the package.

I noticed that the golden casket with diamonds from “Midsummer Night’s Dream” collection was missing. And Paul had not told me anything.
- What great customers you have here! Really the very best.   
- Well, yes.
- And when are you coming back?
- I’ll be back by this evening. See you then.
- Well, London’s not such a faraway place after all.  It’s the same as the distance to Saint Pete . 
- I have never been to Russia. I have formed my impression of the Russians from people like you.
- But I am just a tiny button on the great shirt of our country, - I jested.
- Paul, can you wear shirts without buttons? – asked Jacques.
- When it’s cold or when it’s hot?
- In the morning, he means, dear, - I came to his aid.
- Sex in the morning? – Paul was surprised.
Jacques rushed off like a shot. Some Russians arrived at the Cartier boutique.
            - Go and bring them over here, – Paul exclaimed.

I quickly approached our neighbors.  They even blocked both passes with red ropes. They had finally got them. There were three Russians. One even had a briefcase. I noticed the shine of alligator skin boots. They had probably been invited to «Cartier» to visit the Biennale when they were still in Moscow. I went back briefly to get the magnet key for the showcases.

- Madam, this sapphire seems to be quite a good one. – A Chinese man of medium height, dressed in a silk blue cardigan, was smiling at me; there was a huge Scandinavian behind him, rather plain and sporty-looking.
- Yes, it really is splendid, Monsieur. – I smiled back at him. – Do you want a closer look at it? Will you take a seat, please? – I unlocked the showcase and took out the Kashmiri gem. I occupied the place under the lamp and gave the Chinese man ample opportunity to inspect the jewel.
- Pretty good, pretty good, - he whispered. – Such a big boy! – He took the gem with pincers lying on the tray, and stared at it.
The price of the gem began to pulse in my brain: one million, six hundred thousand Euros. I raised my eyes and saw Jacques entering the boutique.
I wanted to tell him that we were ‘treating ourselves to the buns’ , but I knew he wouldn’t understand the Russian saying. 
- Bonjour, monsieur, - Jacques greeted the customers.

  - I am fond of sapphires and I have been looking for some prize specimen for a long time, - the Chinese greeted him in his turn. It seemed to me that as soon as he saw Jacques he understood who was the boss.  He had a shining blue cabochon on the little finger of his left hand, obviously less precious than ours. – I inherited this one and it has served me for half of my life. – He motioned to the ring with his eyes. – If only the stones could speak for themselves... Although sometimes, of course, they do, - mused the Chinese man. – But this one has probably exhausted its power to do so. I treat it so awfully sometimes. – And he glanced at his companion. The latter nodded, silently and obediently, like an old servant. – I want to acquire some new power, some new energies. – He giggled quietly. – Give me the magnifying glass, please, Madam, - he addressed me.
- Here you are, Monsieur. – I had everything ready for him.
He had been surveying the sapphire for quite a long time now, moving his lips.
- There is some little spot on the girdle. Well, yes... I don’t know whether I will be able to live with this.
- But thirty-eight carats of Kashmiri brilliance are surely worth it, - Jacques interjected into his monologue.  – Let us invite you to our Place de Vend;me boutique; then you can see it in daylight.   
- Well, yes, I’d probably be best to do that.... At about eleven o’clock, shall we say, after some errands? I know it is really beautiful; but do I deserve it? I have not seen such an interesting face for a long time, Madam, - the Chinese man said all of a sudden. – I mean your cheekbones... There is something Asian about them... But I won’t embarrass you, it’s not my place.

- Where are you from? – I asked. I don’t know why, really, just because he was speaking about my cheekbones, which I’ve never cared about in all my life.
- I am from New York, and originally from Shanghai.  Everything has changed so much there now... Our house was returned to us. There was nothing left of the garden. The trees had died, everything had been destroyed. I visited the place where I had been born, where I’d spent my childhood… It was a miserable sight. I do not need anything already... When I was young, I bought cars and houses. I had a wonderful villa in Cannes.
We were listening to him in silence.
- When I left for America for the first time, they took all the antiques and furniture. I put it all back together. But they stole it again. And now I am happy that I just sold everything. What’s the good of owning more than you can use? I decided that I would live in European hotels. Like Nabokov, you know. Would you be offended if I made a supposition about you? – he asked me again.

 He had stuck on to me like a leech... But when someone’s talking about you personally, you can never help but listen attentively.  Of course, I do not know how Jacques felt about all this, but he kept silent. 
- Go ahead, Monsieur. We are all very well acquainted with one another here.
- I think that you are from Russia. Well, excuse my volubility.  See you tomorrow, Messieurs. – He rose to his feet, and the Scandinavian accompanied him.
We bade him farewell.
- Yes! Your cheekbones speak for themselves. We’ve got you!
Paul had been standing a little way off, but he had heard everything. 
- What am I to do now? – I asked the boss.
- I’m leaving; my flight is in five minutes. See you this evening. Good luck! – And off he rushed, taking the queen’s present with him. He’s a very energetic fellow, on the whole.
- We went to their apartment once, on the Rue de Rivoli.  - Paul began to say.
- Whose apartment? The king and the queen’s? – I asked.
- Yes. And there were security guards all around. We had a briefcase with us containing about twenty million worth of stuff.   We stayed outside and waited till they were ready to see us. 
- Did they at least give you a Coca-Cola? 

- There was no problem there, rest assured.  We sat in armchairs and waited.  Different people passed by.   One of them was a very muscular man, sweaty from having just been fitness training. He looked at us and waved. Then the queen came out. We stood up. She was charming. They have such an easy manner – implying “oh, let's have a look at what you have brought us”, as if what we had was just a trifle.  But naturally, she has an eye for jewelry: “Well, this one, I think”.  She liked emerald earrings, and she also found a bracelet for herself. Then the door opened and the king came in. “Hi guys,”. And we said, “Good evening, Your Majesty!” And it was the same man who had waved to us earlier.   
- Do you remember what they bought? – Naturally, I had never had an experience like this one.   
- We left earrings and a bracelet with them. We thanked them and left.
- We have no kings in Russia, just the ones with the hearts and the spades.  And no queens either, except Snow Queens.
- You have tycoons! – Paul winked at me meaningfully.
- Well, you can’t compare those two notions. There is no comparison. You wouldn’t compare a tree and a fence, even if they both attracted your attention. There is a rooster on the fence and a monkey on the tree. There’s the same kind of difference here. Once, we had a tsar with a tsarina. Just one for the whole country, our Emperor.
  - The same goes for us, - laughed Paul.

We did not sell anything significant that day. My three compatriots did not come over to us. Two fashionably dressed Russian-speaking girls popped in, but they had no money on them; they had obviously come to the biennale with something else in mind. Jacques did not get back that evening, because of traffic jams in London. We put everything away in the safe and went home. On my way I telephoned my blue-eyed prince and asked him to come over, but I had completely forgotten that he was in Ancona, Italy, on a business trip.  So I just sniffed and stopped thinking about him. Time to call it a day, read a little, and go to bed.

I popped into the hotel. It wasn’t a particularly luxurious hotel, despite being a four-star.  It would be more accurate to describe it as ancient, but in fact it was rather an old hotel – it was shabby, and it smelt of past lives, of thousands of tourists form all the countries of the world, each with their own energy.   It is popular opinion that we all long for romance, for miracles, French kisses in Paris. What these kisses really are even the French themselves do not know, of course. Something resembling intricately woven lace on a court portrait, or the first gulp of wine, or some divine chocolate...

There were red amaryllises in the vase on an ancient gilded table near the mirror. The bouquet looked so juicy and passionate.
 I stood under the shower. Lavender shower gel soothed me a bit. I put on pajamas, sat for several minutes in the armchair, and went to bed.

I recalled the events of my day. We’ll reconcile the Chinese man to the spot on the gem in the end, I thought…  Where did they find this sapphire? Although it’s quite possible that it came from the vault, how can I know for sure? The most interesting stories in the jewelry business are the ones involving with pursuit of rare stones. The communication between jewelers and their agents all over the world was shrouded in an atmosphere of complete mystery. It could be that some maharaja, for reasons known only to him, decided to get rid of his least interesting gems, of which he was sick and tired. Perhaps he needed money for personal reasons; that is most often the case. “In 1956 Claude Arpels was in a near-ecstatic state, when he received final confirmation that he had purchased the ‘Blue Princess’ from a Bombay dealer – a 114 carat sapphire of 114 carats nonpareil,” – this was written in the book which I had taken with me to the Biennale. – That year he had gone to meet with Maharaja Sahib Bahadur of Rewa, who had expressed an interest in selling some gems. The hospitality of the Maharaja was superb: he was treated to all sorts of delicacies; he enjoyed wonderful music and the sight of dancing beauties. But after that he had to wait. By coincidence, the next day the most dangerous and cunning of predator, a huge white tiger, was caught in the vicinity of the palace. Guests were called to have a look at the captive. Bushes and flowers in the garden were decorated with priceless gems. It became clear to the jewel-besotted Claude Arpels, however, that the time was ripe to choose his gems – he must not miss this chance.  But again, he had to wait. The Agent notified him that the Maharaja was consulting the astrologer, and that in the event of benevolent indications he would be given a sign. Claude went to Deli. One week passed before two emissaries came to the hotel with a hat full of the chosen gems. And the Arpelses were really good at selecting stones. Upon his return to New York this collection was shown to the elite in the ‘Plaza’ hotel, in that same year of 1956. As for the ‘Blue princess’, the stone was a deep blue that did not change with the light. Nine years later the sapphire was sold to a Florence G. Gould. It was set into a necklace as the centerpiece: it was surrounded by three other wonderful sapphires and diamonds. Upon Florence’s death the necklace was exhibited at Christie’s in New York in 1984, and instead of the expected price of eight hundred thousand it was sold at one million three hundred and twenty thousand dollars. So the story went. I did not like it too much. Who had Florence really been?  To whom had the sapphire been sold?

People pass away, and the stones go on...

Although without people they are just numb, inorganic lumps.  In ancient China they had a similar idea.  While Pliny the Elder, the author of the first nature study at the beginning of our era, had called the precious stone “the whole of nature’s creation concentrated in a limited space”, the Chinese valued the stone only after gem-cutting. And the sapphire is tricky because of its faults. Even a little spot can cause trouble. How had he been so discerning? “I don’t know whether I will be able to live with this”. – I remembered the words of our Chinese friend. And then he changed the conversation to the features of my charming face, so that we never returned to the subject of the stone. I looked at the photograph of the necklace of this Florence. Does it really need such a setting? It was a little bit old fashioned for my taste. I would have prescribed something very different for this stone.  And somebody, later on, would criticize my poor judgment.  And so on. The sapphire must be preserved now, sparkling patiently in an American safe, indifferent to our passions.

I was lying on my back and looking at the ceiling. You can look at a ceiling in several different ways, that’s for sure.  Although I never look at the ceiling in the traditional sense, that’s out of the question!  I will probably be able to later on.  I remember that in some hotel in Rome the ceiling was decorated with golden angels, and there was a crystal chandelier in its center producing feeble spots of light on the ceiling. Now I like not only Rome, but also the whole of Italy. “The aura of the sapphire leads to the impulse for spiritual and moral refinement,” the ceiling told me. The sapphire is for clear conscience and justice. The seal of the Tsar Solomon was made of sapphire. It gives strength to the informal power of the owner over other people. It aids travelers. It prefers strong people. It keeps people safe from envy and betrayal. In the New York Museum of Natural History there are busts of the three outstanding American presidents carved out of gigantic blocks of sapphire; these are the busts of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower.

I didn’t want to think about the Chinese man any more, I saw floating dollars and portraits. It was a bedtime.

...About two weeks before my departure from Tunis to Moscow, I dragged my feet, alone on a hot day, to the centre of the city to pick up some souvenirs - because I had nothing better to do, of course. The days passed very slowly. After Karkana I began to see both Ilya and Filimonich as part of the past. I had no more interest for Sergey, and it would be absolute delusion to say that he had given to me any special delight earlier. It was not clear from the very beginning. Well, let it be so after all. Filimonich reeked of business, and absence of spare time – he was a proud fellow. You could also say that he had a sense of dignity. Everybody was looking forward to the departure; all our nerves were on edge.   I was missing my mother and father very much – I felt homesick, and I missed Moscow.  I was walking along the familiar Tunisian streets, almost bidding them ‘goodbye’.   I shouldn’t have gone there alone, but I hadn’t really thought about it. And then Pete stopped me.
- Haven’t you gone yet, Sophie? And I thought you are somewhere around the Red Square already.
- What would I be doing in the Red Square? – I was very happy to see him.
- Well, walking about with a flag. I was thinking only yesterday that I would watch all the parades in order to see you.
- You will see me for sure. There or in some spaceship. When they send back a report from orbit. You’ll have every chance to see me!
- Let’s go and have dinner.  I know exactly where to take you, a place where you won’t meet any of your agents.
- There will be only yours to contend with. – I replied.
We chatted for a couple of minutes, wished each other a good trip and every success. We took our leave without even shaking hands.

Where had this thought come from? Why? I switched off the bedside lamp. Well, enough of it. It was time to sleep.


6

After my trip to Paris I returned to my usual working routine and to the pre-New Year fuss. They announced that the holidays in our country would last for ten days starting from New Year’s.  It meant that you could go on vacations for two more weeks, and make the whole of January into an interesting holiday time. There would be no sales, that much was clear. And then I had to go on a weeklong trip to the Arab Emirates, to the sunny, newly-developed city of Dubai.

I did not want to go to the Russian restaurant located on the fifth or sixth floor of a rather stale hotel in Dubai. It was our Christmas Eve.  A Russian girl named Natasha, who worked in the newly opened local ‘Van Cleef’ boutique, had invited me along so that I could see how they lived, and I had agreed.  I probably said yes because it was holiday time, although without a doubt the real holiday for me is New Year. In my childhood we didn’t celebrate Christmas; it was on the first of January that we took our presents out from under a big, fragrant Christmas tree, decorated each year with the same trinkets. I knew each bauble, made in East Germany, each bird, and a bearded Father Frost  in his long gown who had lived in our house for as long as I could remember.  At that time I knew nothing about Christmas; I didn’t have a single book about it.  I had fairy-tales by Hans Christian Andersen, by the Brothers Grimm, fairy-tales of the nations of the world, Murzilka, Veselie kartinki , the Zvezdochka  calendar; as well as duck with baked apples, tangerines, persimmon, little plastic boxes containing sweets and candies – traditional New Year’s presents, white tights, a bow on my head, snow drifts that seemed as high as the sky, sledges, a big porcelain dinner set, crystal liqueur glasses, Goluboy Ogonyek , happy faces, my dear grandmother, my parents and my brother... There is no denying that my childhood was a happy one. I experienced love, kindness, care, discipline, order, a cozy home, my favorite bed with a pillow trimmed with lace, a teddy-bear that had slept with me until I was twelve. Christmas came into my life after I had lived abroad, once I had become acquainted with Europe.  In Russia, we live according to Gregorian Calendar, but celebrate Christmas after the New Year – even though it makes no sense.

Plenty of things now make no sense. There was a world of good in that extinct country, a lot of good things that scared the whole world. But we had not coped. It had been an unhappy experience. There was no-one reliable to carry out the dream – no proper mature psychology or philosophy among the elite, and certainly none among the lower classes.  The revolutionary situation had been created for quite another revolution. Intoxication with power was not the right way to overcome a trial by this very power. Inevitably violence, aggression and expropriation caused fear. People merely wanted survival, a goal that could be achieved in a number of different ways.  Everyone tried their best.  Now it is all too easy to lay the blame on someone else.  The attractive theory gave a crack at once. It was rewritten, adapted to the Russian background, mulled over… it was like remaking a horribly tailored dress, sewing on a bow, ironing it carefully. Poor Russia was sick and tired of new costumes. I am not a historian, but on a personal level I am convinced: we were not ready.  Take into account our foreign enemies, wars, international conspiracies and coalitions, expenses on defense, state safety, intelligence support, our own corrupted and bribed officials, mediocre leadership (especially during the last decades), immense distances, inadequate roads, semi-feudal peasantry, the undeveloped light industry, our inability to compete with the enterprises of the rest of the world. We had no beautiful clothes; there was a total absence of the beauty of life. I remember it quite well. We had a distorted conception of beauty, temporally and spatially distant from us. We lived by the beauty of the past and by the beauty of other countries. We had no potential to create beauty for ourselves. We forgot the meaning of the word ‘quality’. Sometimes we watched European films to see the interiors of the houses, their clothes, their resorts, their cars.  It is such a simple and insignificant detail – the beauty of your surroundings. There was no European country where people could study free of charge not only in schools but also at the Universities and Conservatoires; no European country provided free medical service or apartments with free central heating and warm water, albeit small apartments, – but it all existed in our country.  A lot of people had overcome poverty and illiteracy. And a lot of people had been degraded. There was no possibility to use your creative potential - egalitarianism oppressed people, no matter how paradoxical that might seem. And people tried to escape. Often, these people were the best minds of our country.  And people like that are always welcome elsewhere.  Of course, you can ignore the country – its history, the victory in World War II – you can even forget about your parents’ experience.  That sort of thing happens.  You can think globally, about the whole world, and you can understand the individual as a world citizen.  Why do we need to reminisce about the past, to dwell on our relationship with our nation?  Are these things determined purely by chance?  Are they useful?  Is nationality the factor that determines the essence of our characters?  I think it is. This is the key. In all probability, about 90% of the motivation for our future actions originate from this core. I feel sorry for people who think they can ignore this, who fail to understand its significance, who have no love for their country.   It is as though they are negating their own selves... You can live anywhere you like, but only the outward appearance changes, not the contents.  Sometimes you see a picture of a French landscape and it’s totally different from what you expect from a French artist – a different style of tree, a different palette of colours, different snow… and it turns out that you are looking at a picture of France painted by a Russian or Japanese artist. Ultimately, the art only benefits from this phenomenon. You can’t help but notice things like that. It isn’t eclecticism of different cultures and schools; it is enrichment. It isn’t something that can be mechanically learnt and imitated. Feelings are the most inscrutable mystery, and strong emotions preserve and safeguard our world. And it is better to start with yourself, your attitude to yourself, to your birthplace – even if you do not come from a particularly prosperous metropolis, even if your mother is not a well-educated woman, even if your father is not a well-to-do person. Do we really lack examples where such disadvantages in no way hindered the development of a personality?

I discussed all this with myself in a gloomy kitsch imitation of a Russian restaurant in Dubai. I think that my meditations were quite original considering my surroundings.
 
I remembered that I had drunk champagne and shouted ‘Freedom!’ with the others while the Berlin wall was being torn down. It is the most stupid and deceitful word when it’s related to politics. Well, at last we have beautiful things and an abundance of tasty food; we have visited Courchevel and Sardinia, we have traveled widely. And how do they perceive us over there? And what do they think of the “owners of factories, lands and ships”  who have accumulated enormous wealth over the past several years – the rich customs officers, major real estate owners with teenage wives wearing twenty-carat stones set into their rings? Better not to look at them at all, to avoid them altogether.  If they like island X – let’s leave it to the Russians, calmly and smilingly; so be it, and the foreigners won’t go there again. Does anyone really want to see them (Russians) blowing their noses on the tablecloths, throwing chairs, yelling mafia songs into the night and giving the waiter a hundred dollars as a tip?  But the audience in this particular restaurant was not remarkably generous. There were personnel from the local service sphere: waiters, salesmen, maids, petty clerks from the former USSR. They drank vodka, ate Olivier salad, watched some program on choreography that strongly resembled the East German Friedrichstadtpalast New Year concert.  A lot of people had no conception of the new Russia. As a rule, you miss home for the first few years – and then as soon as you get à short vacation, if you are given such, you want to go somewhere else or relax where you are. A trip home is not so cheap. People adapt, make new friends, develop new habits.

- Sonia! Here’s to Christmas, to new happiness! Let’s thank our Lord! – said Marina, sitting at the table. I had no idea who she was. – Lyalya will arrive soon, with her Lebanese boyfriend. She’s a real beauty! I will introduce you to one another. She’s from Yekaterinburg .

Marina motioned ‘cheers’ with her wineglass full of fizzy pink wine. Music was playing so loudly it sounded like a jet plane.  I couldn’t hear properly; it was impossible to talk.  My presence was probably making Natasha feel uncomfortable. I didn’t seem to be one of them.

Lyalya came over with a telephone. She really was beautiful. To describe her neckline as plunging would be something of an understatement.  She sat down and greeted me, still busy with her toy. She asked how much my manicure cost in Moscow. I answered her. She scrutinized all of my ten fingers and said she could do something similar, but that she was paid less, and so she gave a worse manicure.  I think she meant she gave her customers a worse manicure for less money. Then she went across the hall, spoke to someone and returned. Her reason for living in Dubai was to get married and get settled. She had her plan all sorted, I was in no doubt of that. Lyalya cast uninterested glances at me. Although I was dressed in a pistachio green blouse and gray Valentino trousers, I looked like a domestic parrot among peacocks.

A long-legged girl came up to us.
- This is Ksyusha. She also started working as a manicurist, - said Marina.
I did not ask where she had gone from there, or what she was doing now.  Judging by her appearance, she was still looking for her lucky break.  I glanced at my watch. Ksyusha headed for the buffet.
- She served Sheikh Halid quite recently, - Marina whispered in my ear.
- Who’s he? – I shouted.
- Have you seen the pink palace by the seaside?
- I haven’t even seen the sea yet.
Natasha signaled to her, but Marina ploughed on:
- He likes long legs and pretty faces.
- He’s only interested in one thing. – I didn’t want to yell, but it was kind of impolite not to participate in conversation.
- When the sheikh is in the mood for it, he calls up a certain agency, and they hire ten girls for him – enough to fill the bus.
- And why does he need so many? – I wondered. – Oh, yes, I’ve got it: you ask for some apples, and you’re offered the pick of a whole basket.  You need to choose.
 
- To cut a long story short, all the girls come dressed up. They take seats - continued Marina. – They are treated to dates, although this isn’t gospel, as I haven’t been there myself – I don’t know all this for sure. I can ask Ksyusha about it.  Anyway, he makes his choice, as you have observed.  Excitement, nervous laughter, broken English... Then he goes away and everybody is left waiting. Instrumental music, splash of the fountain, an atmosphere of mystery. And then in comes the servant with a coral red scarf. He is in no hurry; he walks to and fro for twenty minutes, talking to the women. He is not a servant in the proper sense of the word. It is quite possible that he is the sheikh’s secretary, and has a degree from Oxford.   Everybody is so polite – there are good manners, smiles and quiet conversation. The general tension is increasing.

  - Are the stakes high? – I shouted again.
- Depends on what you call high. They are Ok... Office workers aren’t paid that well.
- And what does the secretary do with the scarf?
- Nothing. He puts it somewhere – on the piano, for example.   The scarf is the sign that sheikh has made his choice. He pours out more whisky. He is enjoying himself and observing the women.
- He’s probably trying to pick someone for himself. –I found myself listening and commenting.  Was there any way of avoiding it?
- No, that’s prohibited. Or in any case, it’s never happened.  If he comes in without a scarf, everybody is free to go.
- It means that he didn’t like any of them? – I asked.
- Yeah, that didn’t like any of them.  But the agency is very experienced.  It is difficult to get onto the bus, and you can only go once. The market is overflowing.
- Yeah, the times are difficult for everybody! –I exclaimed.
- Soon the light becomes dimmer and dimmer till it is almost dark. Then in comes another servant with a burning torchlight.  He goes up to the chosen girl and takes her with him.
- The light is switched on, - I continued. – The claxon of the bus can be heard. “Girls, quickly, time to go!”  And out they go into the street in a crowd.   
  - They make a merry crowd, I would say. They all get at least a dozen each. – By the way she said it I could see that she needed money.
- And how much is the woman who is asked to stay paid?
- A hundred, of course. And I’ve no idea what she can get if she’s especially gifted.
- What an opportunity! – I exclaimed again.
- And what tension! With a success like that you can leave this place. But Ksyusha is so silly. She likes alcohol, razzle-dazzle, lending money. If you ask her how much she has left, you’ll see that she has spent almost everything.
- Was she a winner?
- Well, yes. Let’s stop talking about such sad stuff. Lyalya would have squeezed half a million out of the sheikh.
- Why doesn’t she? –I looked at Lyalya. Her Lebanese friend had already come over to her and she had stopped talking on her mobile phone.
- She’s waiting for her turn. – Marina drained her wineglass. – And Natasha and I work day in, day out, and get up at seven o’clock in the morning.
- Sonia, let’s go? – Natasha wanted to get me out of the place, the quicker the better.
- Let’s go! – I stood up, said good-bye to everybody, and we headed for the entrance.

 On the whole I enjoyed the time I spent in Dubai. I tried to fulfill the tasks I had to do for my job, and I enjoyed observing our tourists, staying in the newly built luxurious hotels of Jumeirah. These were very different Russians. And Marina’s story resembled an Eastern fairy-tale from the beginning of the previous century. Although some of the women still bore the traces of their not-quite-decent past. Money that drops from the clouds won’t help you change your character all that much.  That’s why they’re fond of Dubai, mad as it is for petrodollars.   The country’s fortunes are not dissimilar to their own.  Some fifty years ago the five star hotel Burj Al Arab would have barbarians from the tribes inhabiting the Western cost of Persian Gulf really faint. And the far-from-numerous Soviet tourists, who had traveled abroad at that time or even just twenty years ago, would not have even been able to afford an extra dinner in a medium-level restaurant, to say nothing of visiting the massage room in a fashionable, European-class hotel.

After I had strolled along the Arabian market, which had been bursting with local and Indian exotic goods, I made myself comfortable in an Italian restaurant by the side of an artificially constructed channel on which tourist-filled boats floated. Everything was situated on the territory of one of the hotels, or to put it more exactly, on the territory of a complex, comprising several hotels. I could hear the Russian language being spoken at the table behind mine: such a common sound around there that I didn’t even turn my head. I had a meeting with the ÐR-director of the complex, an Englishman by birth. We were going to organize an exhibition there, and generally establish a more efficient relationship with their Russian customers. What’s especially remarkable about Englishmen is their cold, reserved, businesslike manner – a particular kind of seriousness mixed with a slight snobbishness.  And this manner is preserved even when they’re smiling from ear to ear.   This Englishman wasn’t my senior; he was more like an interlocutor for me. I had come to tell him that our wonderful French company sent their regards to his hotel, and to suggest that we could be of some use to one another given our common interest in Russian tourists.   Or something like that. He was about forty seven years old, quite a typical, classic Englishman – fair-haired , blue-eyed – wearing a suit with narrow trousers and a white shirt, business cards at the ready. His name was Simon. It was a pleasure simply listening to him, because his English was faultless. Somehow he didn’t seem to be looking into my eyes.  He was looking at my neck.

 - Simon, why do you look at my neck so often? Do you like my pendant? – It was a little diamond butterfly, by Van Cleef & Arpels, of course. – Or have you remembered that you’ve forgotten to do something? Make a call if you need to. – I looked at his phone.
- I have been to Moscow seven times, - Simon replied.
- And? – I almost laughed out loud.
- Every time I go there, some brilliant idea occurs to me, and thanks to these ideas I get promoted.  And it’s not just a question of me having the ideas; I implement them as well, I bring them to life. 
- Are you trying to say that you’ve had another of these ideas?
- Surprisingly, I have - nodded Simon. – For a whole week I’ve been racking my brains... And now I’ve got it – exactly what one of my advertisement managers wanted from me. It’s a miracle!
You know, he was right.
- Perhaps I can be of some help in your private life? Use your chance; we’ve got three days left, - I joked.
- My mother’s brother, my uncle, is married to an Italian woman. Her name is Sophie. She’s a fabric designer, - Simon told me.
- So?... – was all I could say.
- I was very close with my nephew, the Sophia’s sister’s son.
- What’s her name?
- Whose?
  - Aunt Sophia’s sister.
- Gina. Don’t make me sidetrack Sophie, - Simon laughed – In fact, I’m sidetracking myself.
- And what about your friend?
- I loved Gina. – He looked at me, but my reaction clearly didn’t mean anything to him. Simon was sort of trying to use his new “inspiration”. – He saw us together, and we stopped being friends. But it wasn’t my fault. It was nobody’s fault.
- How do you feel about this? – I thought that all this would have made more sense if he’d told me about it late in the evening at the bar after a drink or two, or at least if he had known me better, but he had said it in such a straight forward manner: “Aunt Sophia…”.   And to think that he’s an Englishman.  Why do we give people these labels?
- Obviously I feel something - Simon replied. – But I won’t take up your time with this.  It would be very rude of me.
- I don’t know what to say. Excuse my bluntness, but in my opinion it’s pretty rude to engage me in conversation about intimate matters like this, and then break off the discussion having only told me half of the story.   I’m not some charity, you know.   Honestly speaking, I would never do a thing like that. Now, are you being serious?
- I’m not sure - Simon gave a laugh.

It seemed to me that he had some inner conflict. He probably regretted having begun this talk. Anything that’s beyond the bounds of the ordinary always calls for a certain amount of misunderstanding and criticism. But as we grow older, we become bolder. What is really more important: to resolve the situation (if he actually wanted to resolve it) or to worry about what I would make of it?
He wasn’t really worried about what I was thinking of him, so he continued:

- There’s one thing that I can’t leave unnoticed. – He glanced again at my butterfly. – Have you ever had a feeling that higher forces are playing some wonderful game of symbols and riddles with us?  You can ignore them, you can pretend that coincidences are mere chance, that they have no significance – but some tiny chain of events often result in a life being saved, as in the case of that Brazilian dealer, who lit up a cigar in the ‘Windows în the World’ restaurant in the World Trade Center building on the 11th of September 2001, at 8:30am.  He was told that smoking in any public building in New York was forbidden.   Instead of putting out the cigar, he went out into the street. And his stubbornness saved him his life.
- Or his cigar did. Yes, I read about that in a book by Begbeder. Somebody was late for work on that day, somebody’s child fell ill, somebody’s car broke down. And somebody came to that restaurant for the first time in his life to have breakfast.
  - Yes, that’s what I wanted to say. But noticing the sign is half the work: it’s very important to interpret it correctly.
- Are you often mistaken? Or is the essence of the game that we cannot be mistaken because we are merely being led?  Personally, I don’t like to rake up the dust and ashes of the past.   
- It’s easier to live for women. They have better intuition, they trust their feelings more.
- But the world is not a feminine place, Simon.  Wars are not initiated by women.
- But quite often because of them.

- Well, yes and no. I don’t believe that. Glory, power and material wealth are more important for you, but sometimes things do happen because of the energy of feminine inspiration. We are driven by powerful instincts, never forget that. While your motivation is personal safety, our motivation is maternity. Everything is logically organized. What’s this thing that you can’t avoid, then? – I took a coffee spoon and began to turn it in my hand, in order to calm him a little. I often do things like that. It diverts the person’s attention for a split second or so. 
- I can’t even guess what it is.
- But you cannot ignore it or pretend to be blind, as you’ve said yourself. You have always got a choice.

Working where he did, Simon had seen thousands of women.  I was surely not the most attractive one, and it was crazy to think that a mature and well-to-do man had been overwhelmed by my incomparable charm in just five minutes. Especially as he was not likely to have much time to spare in the middle of his workday
- Another time, maybe... – Simon lost his nerves in a typically masculine way.
- Where? In Moscow? – I joked.
- Well yes! Sure! – As if it had just dawned on him.
- But you still don’t have an answer! Or have you just guessed it?
- I’ll wait for it to come to me. You’ve helped me a lot, Sophie. Don’t think of me as crazy, I beg you.
- I’ll do my best. As long as you don’t rope me into solving your puzzles; they only make sense to you, you know. 
- Forget about them. I will, by all means, contact the representative of “Van Cleef and Arpels” in Dubai about the purpose of your visit. There’s no doubt about that. Thank you again for your time. It was a pleasure to meet you.
He stood up. We said farewell to each other.

I took a taxi and went to the boutique. Dubai mansions on both sides of the road stimulated my imagination – by that time pretty active – to work even more intensively. There was something very touching about the Englishman. What was the coincidence that he had spoken of? He had also mentioned his trips to Russia and his first love. What had he thanked me for? All sorts of things can happen between people! What was his problem? He had lost his friend, and now he doesn’t know what to do. I’ve helped him. I had better not delve into it any further. What souvenir should I buy to remember this trip by? The Russians always buy something abroad. Before we didn’t have anything, but now we have it all.

I brought a silk carpet from Dubai. Now walk on it at home. The Hindu who sold it to me obviously cheated me.


































7

We were excited, all four of us. The excitement was making our conversation pretty incoherent.
- Ok, so whose idea was this? – I asked Ilya once they were all sitting down at our table, after we’d finished with the kisses and hugs.   It seemed to me as though he glanced at Pete for a split second before replying to my difficult question.
- One evening, Mr. Kent phoned me from New York, - Ilya began his tale in the manner of a kindly storyteller.
- And where were you at that time?
- I’m currently living in Geneva.
- Right.  Excuse my ignorance.
- And he said: “Look, I’m going to Moscow. We’re financing some aircraft project. And I want to use the chance to see you all again” – continued Ilya.
- And why haven’t you brought Alicia with you? How is she?
  - We’ll talk about Alicia later.

He paused. Nobody would catch my eyes. If it hadn’t been for the noise of the overcrowded restaurant, I would have felt the jingling of silence, the kind of silence where you don’t even feel you can breathe. 
- You’re not talking about the 11th of September, are you? - I was afraid of my own words.
We looked at one another.
- Is that it, Pete?
He nodded.
- She called me from the Tower when it was on fire, - whispered Pete.
He had probably not fully recovered from the events of that day; it was likely that he’d lost more than just Alicia.  He stretched out his hand to me over the table. I put my palm on his palm, then Ilya and Sergey did the same.  In our youth we had had so many barriers preventing us from sitting easily together, from joking and arguing without looking around or continually checking the time.   Now everything was possible.

I remembered that Alicia had liked Ilya. She had been a rather peculiar girl, but then we were all so young, so na;ve, to cope with our emotions and sympathies.  We had been looking for things that you can’t find in real life; we didn’t know ourselves yet, and we didn’t know what the world wanted from us.   I never knew anything about her life after Tunis; I didn’t know whether she’d had a child, someone who she’d loved, or what she’d been busy with. I only knew only that it was wrong for her life to have ended so early. It was deplorable.

- Are you in Moscow for long? – I made an attempt to turn the conversation back to the events of the evening.
- We have some time left. – Pete was trying to be amiable and openhearted, as he had been before. – Hey, girl, you’ve developed good taste for jewelry, as far as I can see, - he winked.
- As I told you, she’s a very busy woman, - Ilya made a remark.
- I can hardly believe it! God moves in mysterious ways… Van Cleef & Arpels near the Kremlin!
- Enough of the Kremlin, you always bring things round to the Red Square. We’ve changed a lot here in Russia. Get used to it. Although these changes wouldn’t have taken place without your valuable help.  The situation you have with us Russians is more or less obvious. What are you going to do with the Chinese? – Poor Pete was taken aback by my words.             - I don’t eat duck, - he smiled.
- Or at least, you don’t yet, - remarked Sergey. – We’ve just been at a Balanchine evening at the Bolshoi – I changed the topic of conversation once more.
- Oh really? We’ve been there too, - Pete was surprised, allegedly.
- You don’t say! I really don’t know what else to expect from you.
 
***

The next day, as I was sitting at a table near the Biscuit restaurant, waiting for Pete (well, we hadn’t exactly arranged to meet, but if I knew him at all he wouldn’t restrict himself to just that one meeting last night) I found myself thinking about Alicia again, God forgive her! If she’d called Pete above everyone else in the last few minutes of her life, knowing she had such a short time to live, what kind of a relationship had they had?  It must have been a pretty intimate one, very intimate indeed – but nobody last night had mentioned it. Why had he hidden it then, what for? It was pretty strange. What had she told him? The brief conversation must have been an intensely intimate one. It had been painful for Pete to think about her. And the other men felt pity for him. All of them had come as if they had been ordered, and they all were busy, married, mature people. Actually, I didn’t know all that much about Sergey and Ilya. How can you measure this ‘much’?   What can be observed on the exterior of a person, and what is hidden inside?  What is officially exposed, and what is in the heart?  How much money does he earn and how much of it does he spend? And it also seemed to me that there was something uniting the three of them, something I didn’t know about yet.  Given their pragmatic natures it wasn’t difficult to conclude that they wanted something from me, the same sort of thing. But I’m probably too pragmatic myself; I shouldn’t give myself so many airs!

 The waiter brought a porcelain teapot and a cup, along with a dish of dried cherries and tangerines. I had had dinner at this restaurant almost every day for the past several years; I knew every dish on the menu by heart and recognized every waiter. I celebrated every birthday there, scheduled meetings with my friends, brought my children there for lunch – and had always sincerely said that the food at Biscuit was delicious.  As a result of my loyalty, they had given me a thirty percent discount. Even though it was a necessary loyalty – eating there helped me to save time.

I didn’t feel all that well. A sleepless night had affected my state of mind, as well as an unpleasant conversation with a particularly proud customer, one of those people just beginning to develop a taste for money.   For those who don’t know, I want to state that selling jewelry is an awful, nerve-wracking process.   We are all formed by our childhood, according to Exup;ry, and all but a few of our dear compatriots who can afford Van Cleef & Arpels were formed in the USSR.  This brings with it characteristic social phenomena of developed socialism.  First of all, medium, minor, major, total corruption is the preferred solution to any problem: possible or impossible, legal or illegal, wishes or requests.  Second, officials never fail to pull rank (established earlier according to party membership – and in Moscow, there are as many of these characters as there are stars in the sky).  These two customs are as horrible, destructive and shameful in the jewelry shop as in any other establishment. Of course you counter that by arguing that if it weren’t for unimaginable bribes and corruption you would be deprived of the major part of your income – you couldn’t get nearly as much from businessmen alone.  And besides, with every year that goes by these people become more and more active: they cruise around the world, they pay more and more legal taxes, they become less afraid of showing their true incomes – because this allows them to use banking system to make payments, and in Europe 13% of taxes deducted from goods are paid back to the foreigner no matter what. And it’s not like we’re selling “wonder napkins” costing 10 rubles each, so you can easily overlook that thirteen percent.   Officials are quite another kettle of fish. They need to spend money in our country, and they need to spend it in cash.  You can’t even enter their names into the customer database. When I ask for their name, surname and telephone number - just to implement the basic service that’s due to them – they introduce themselves as “Sasha”, “Petya”, “Kolya”, giving their first names only, and the mobile phone number of their driver.  No mention is made of the address to which we should be able to send new catalogues, flowers to congratulate them on their birthday, souvenirs. Before, even the little information they now give was withheld.  So this morning some plump lady in a red coat (with rounded lips that had clearly been pumped up to several times their natural size) had been making a fuss, complaining about why we couldn’t give money back in return for already purchased goods.  She worked for the Administration team of the President, you know, all mighty and ever so legally competent. She was basically upset to find that one of the schemes she’d come up with didn’t work well when applied to the jewelry business. Such a pity for the poor woman. I was sick and tired of her, just like a psychiatrist after an interview with some aggressive patient. 

Just when I felt like standing up, Sergey appeared in the doorway.
- You’re in a role as a networking genius once again, I see.  Hello - I smiled to him. He kissed my hand, and I smelt his perfume once more. – I admire your bourgeois style, my dear.
He was dressed in new and expensive clothes. The pattern on the scarf was a perfect match for his tie, as though the ensemble had come straight out of the textbook of some Italian tailor.
- I just popped in by chance; I happened to be passing by.  - Sergey narrowed his eyes at me.  I’d have to be totally stupid to believe a story like that.  – You haven’t waited for me, Sophia Pavlovna.  But I can understand that.  I’m like a ghost from your past. 
  - Well, finally you are not longer a ghost from my past.  Why do you try to frighten me? – I looked at the entrance just to see whether the rest of them had already appeared in the doorway by a similar ‘chance’. 
- To be honest, I always thought you’d get involved in luxury business. – He pointed to the boutique with a nod.
- And what kind of business are you involved in?
- Ilya and I are busy with the directing financial flows, you could say.  He got me into it.  We deal with a couple of different funds. Mostly it goes into real estate. Your age suits you... – Sergey finally paid me a compliment.
- As yours does you.
He was served espresso and he drank in one go, like a real Italian.
- Look here, Birdie... To cut a long story short, Pete asked me to bring you to him. It’s about a very personal matter.  I don’t actually know anything about it. Could you leave the boutique for, say, two hours?
- Where should I go to?
- I will send Karandash to you at four o’clock. He’ll drive you.
- Sonia! Victoria’s birthday is coming up pretty soon! – An old customer of ours was facing me, a man who had often purchased enough in one go to fulfill the boutique’s monthly sales target. And he could easily have done even more.
- It’s a long time since we last saw you, Innokenty!
– Get back to business, dear, - Sergey said to me.
 
***

- Suggest something to me, please, Sonia. –Innokenty made himself comfortable in the armchair. – I want the colors of spring, possibly with red and yellow tinges. I feel elated. There are so many things which have not yet come true.
- It’s good that they haven’t come true yet.  That’s why you feel elated.  Take a look. – I showed him red tourmalines set with diamonds. Viktoria had dark hair and a very pale, porcelain-like skin.  She was calm and a little bit ironic, and she always wore dresses. She certainly wasn’t just a housewife. I think she was the owner of a tourist agency, one specializing in the sphere of education, perhaps.  I’d heard something like that.   She was one of those women who accept presents but don’t ask for them.
- Is there anything else? – Innokenty asked.
- This one with pink and violet sapphires – it’s a new item... I can try it on for you. – I tried it on to show him how it looked, but I wasn’t really in the mood for it. I was thinking about something else. Something ‘personal’ that Pete wanted me for, wasn’t it?
- Sonia, there’s an awful number on this label! – Innokenty pouted.
- Well, only the first two digits.

He was choosing jewelry for his wife. He was absorbed by the process for which he probably had set up his business and struggled through business meetings. This was something that he would look back on with affection in his old age.  He took the necklace into his hands, and as far as I could see, he was savoring the moment – both this moment and the moment when he would give the present to her. That was good of him.
- If we get it wrong, it’ll be a catastrophe, Sonia. But we’ve never made a mistake yet, - he comforted himself. – Calculate the discount and I will pay you this evening.
- You re so sweet! – I said, instead of bidding him goodbye.  That was done quickly, neatly, without any fuss. Let’s hope it’s a good sign for the rest of the day, I thought.   
 
Then several girls in high-heeled boots who were passing by popped in.  They cast glances about the place, looking for something to ask for, and I began writing the next order and checking up the remaining products. There was always an insufficient quantity of goods, but that’s usual in the luxury business.  It was difficult for us, being situated in faraway Moscow, to compete with European boutiques that did not face the problems of boundaries and customs and surveillance. Three or four items that weren’t delivered on time could play a very important role in terms of our turnover. And it’s hard to convince people that when I have four bracelets on sale I need the fifth one just because Lenochka  likes the one with butterflies more than the ones with leaves and flowers.   And Lenochka is quite right. She can wait, of course, but if her George happens to be in Paris or in Geneva he, in all probability, will buy it there, whereas ours might not arrive in time.  When you measure it in Mercedes cars, a bracelet like that sometimes costs as much as three or four automobiles. So it’s always a pity to miss these chances.

The security guard standing at the main entrance of the showroom came in. – Sonia, this envelope is for you.
- Thank you, Valery.
I opened the pink envelope. There was a pencil inside it. It was quite an elegant way to say that the car was waiting.













8

- Is the music disturbing you? – asked the supremely polite Karandash. We were stuck in a traffic jam on the Sadovoye Circle.
-No, it’s fine.
A bunch of newspapers and lady’s silk cosmetics bag by Guerlain were sticking out of the pocket in the back of the front seat. My mobile phone rang.
- Hello, Sonia, it’s Ilya speaking.   Are you in the car?
- Yes, we’re stuck on the Circle near Noviy Arbat. I’m listening to some music. Do you want to have a preliminary talk before the meeting?
- I don’t quite understand what’s going on myself; I wanted to ask you. Sergey is keeping it all very secret.
- And why do you think it is that he knows about whatever it is when you don’t? It was you that Pete called first.
- He dislikes me because of Alicia.
- And did you actually do it? – I asked him straight out.
- Do what?
- Did you actually do it with Alicia?
- Yes, in Tunis. But that’s such childish stuff. You should ask Pete what he did in Africa.
 - You mean on Karkana island?
- …
-  With Alicia on Karkana Island?
-  I didn’t call you up to talk about this.
-  And what did Sergey get up to on Karkana Island, then?
-  …
- I’ve got no idea why you ever took me there.   I nearly died of fear: I was so na;ve and so unprepared for anything like that. If I hadn’t run away, how would I have coped there?  All your horrible tricks, Pekarsky.  You’re a real terror!
- Sardine, don’t rake up the past. That time’s gone now.   
- Is it really gone, when you lot all turn up in my life like this?  Ah, it looks like we’re moving again.  I’ll call you, maa salama, - I said goodbye to him in Arabic, and pressed the OFF button without waiting to hear whether or not he had anything else to say to me. 

– Do you know Pekarsky, Karandash?
Ilya drove me crazy.  Just to satisfy his own curiosity he had called me at the worst time possible – in the middle of a journey to an unknown location for an unknown purpose.  He must have guessed I’d be feeling worried, and hoped that I’d come clean about whatever it is he wants to find out. 
- Do I know Ilya Michaylovich? – Karandash asked.
- The very same.
- How could I not know him? It was he who gave me this nickname, for which I’m very grateful. He’s so shrewd! But I’m not supposed to talk to you, Sofia Palna.
- Don’t worry, I only asked out of curiosity. I don’t have anything to do with them. They’re just friends from my youth. When will we get wherever we’re going?
Karandash did not look like a mere chauffeur. He was no older than thirty-five, with chestnut hair and gray eyes.  He was a little taller than average, and of a neat, athletic build, just like his boss.
- I am driving you to the city centre, Sofia Palna! – he murmured, as if excusing himself.

The mobile rang again. The number wasn’t recognised. Just a ‘call’, and that’s it. It was my foreign Prince who was calling.  We’d known each other for a long time, and now it seemed to him as though I’d disappeared, for some reason.  During the five years of our acquaintance we had traveled all over the world. I spent much of my spare time with him – all my holidays and, quite often, even the week-ends. First we traveled all over Europe, then all over America, and then Japan. I didn’t interfere into his idyllic family life, and he tried not to ask about my life in Moscow – although he’d begun to show an interest in it recently. A lot of people don’t believe in relationships like ours, but it depends on your outlook.  I’ve worked out my own perspective, with a good deal of effort, of course, and I’m convinced now that I’m not really cut out for the monotonous routine of family-life; I always need a drive, as my elder daughter puts it.  Without the tie of financial dependence on another person, your horizons broaden: the fear of being abandoned is gone, as is the uncertainty of old age, cellulite and all the other unpleasant worries.  My children from my two previous marriages have already grown up, and they are beginning to find their own way. When that happened, I found myself living alone again, and I felt young once more.  I found I still liked looking at myself in the mirror, even in the bathroom or in the dressing room of a shop.   Of course, you can make a career out of men – you can get rich, live off your alimony… but I was proud of having had no bargains with my soul, and proud of never having played the role of the caring housewife, serving out the breakfast.  I had loved both my husbands very much, as much as I could, and I left them as soon as I saw that those feelings were exhausted, that we were no longer eager to live together.  I did not take anything from them; I left them apartments, the other junk, even the photos. But still... I had the wisdom acquired from the experience of living with another person, sharing your world with him, if you want to put it like that; I knew what it felt like to discern another’s secret desires, to help them overcome their fears, to express tenderness, to share my innermost thoughts, to know another’s strengths and weaknesses… it’s impossible to list all the essential insights that make up a good marriage.  I would not describe my life as difficult and I certainly don’t consider myself a fool. Not in this sphere of life, at least. Because I have known and still know a lot of ‘good girls’ who are unhappy, who suffer despite their gilded cages and diamond earrings.   It’s inevitable - even normal – to try to conform to your partner’s wishes, and to use your cunning to a certain extent, if your major goal is the guy’s money and way of life rather than the man himself.  And they always have that wonderful pretext at the ready – ‘I did it for the children’s sake’.  Sometimes children are even born in pursuit of this goal – it does happen, you know.   Sometimes these women pretend to be helpless, insecure, hoping their husbands will respond to this.  Sometimes they even turn to magic for help, consulting mystics, putting drops of blood into their husbands’ wine.  This, for them, constitutes saving their families.  They ignore their husbands’ lovers. Some European film star once said that husbands with mistresses are better at sex.  That’s probably true at a certain stage of a marriage, perhaps at the beginning of family life.  Fortune has many paths for all of us.  Sometimes you’re both ill-matched, quite simply, and sometimes everything goes swimmingly right from the start.  The most important thing is to be able to acknowledge what you want, and to have the courage to choose the path to that goal – then the heavens will be on your side.  So I told my prince that I had met my friends from the Institute, that I’d been to a performance at the Bolshoi the night before, and that I wanted to visit Barcelona again. 

- What friends? – he asked.
I promised to call him back as soon as I had time.
It was beginning to rain.
I looked at my suede shoes with thin soles, and reflected that we’d probably stop right at the entrance or get to the garage.  I had no umbrella with me, but maybe there was one in the car. 
- You know... – I wanted to ask Karandash to hurry up, but I didn’t finish what I was saying – as behind us a white Volga auto bumped into us at speed.

It was a proper car crash. I banged my knee against the door, ripped my tights, and spilled the contents of my bag, which was unzipped as usual, all over the floor. Wonderful are your works, God!  It was like a bolt from the blue!
- Call your boss and ask him where I should go, I told the distressed Karandash. There was no umbrella in the car.
- Where can you go in that white coat? You’ll be soaked through in five minutes.   
- Give me the address! That’s my problem. You’ve got plenty of your own to worry about. – I picked up all the little things that had fallen out of the bag. I found a pantyliner and pressed it to the scratch on the knee.  Then I sprayed perfume on it. It stung, just like in the countryside during my childhood, when my bedtime wash would release the pain of every scratch acquired during the day’s activities.  I had also suffered from gnat-stings, into which I had been supposed to press a cross with my fingernail.

- Sofia Palna, why don’t you call Sergey?  He’ll probably be able to suggest something.…
- Please call him yourself, Karandash.  You’ll have to sort all this out with the officials, sign all that stuff… you should talk to him.  Let him know what’s happened, and I can find my own way there.  I’m not made of sugar and I won’t melt.  So, where is this place that we’ve been driving towards for the last hour?   – I decided not to ask about Pete – perhaps he had no idea about any of this strange affair.  Then it struck me.
– Why has nobody come out of the Volga? – I cried, and turned back. The windscreen wipers weren’t working, and the heavy rain prevented me from seeing anything.   
- I’ll be back soon! – Karandash popped out of the car, went round to the driver’s door of the other vehicle and tried to open it.

I leant forward from the back seat in order to switch on the hazard warning lights. A mobile rang – Karandash’s, not mine.   I picked up the phone and pressed the ON button.
- Hello, Pencil, can you hear me? Is everything going according to plan? – It was Ilya’s voice.
- What plan would that be, Pekarsky? – I couldn’t help saying out loud, but I didn’t hear anything else because I was shaking all over. I looked back: Karandash was standing at the open door of the Volga, talking to the driver. I sighed, much relieved, and honked twice.  Then I leant back into the chair.
- What’s happened? –Karandash asked, returning. 
- Find out if that driver has an umbrella? Do it, quickly! – I sent him back. The rain was getting heavier and heavier; it was really bad luck.
- He says he does have one, but it’s old, and one of the wires is broken. – Karandash came over in a minute. 
I seized a sloppy black umbrella from his hands.
- Thank you. Now give me that address! I’m waiting! – I must have looked a little crazy, because he just stared back at me, stunned – What on earth is the matter? – I raised my voice.
-  You’re meant to be at 11 Krivoarbatsky Street. The code is ‘Alicia’. Go to the second floor. It will take you ten minutes if you’re quick.
- Do you think I’m likely to walk slowly in these conditions?
- Do you know where it is exactly?
- I have lived here my whole life. I’ll find the place, no problem! – I stepped out of the car.

I got drenched at once. The umbrella covered some of me, but it was of little use. It turned out that we’d stopped quite close to our destination; we were even on the right side of the road.  Besides, you can walk really quickly if you don’t care about the puddles. I passed the building of the Foreign Ministry. Out of all the multi-storied buildings of Stalin epoch, this one has been my favorite since childhood. I don’t remember how old I had been, but after the film ‘The Ambassador of the Soviet Union’ I often imagined myself as Kollontay, dressed in a long black dress with a red silk ribbon sewed on askew from the left shoulder up to the waist, looking like Miss Universe as I walked up the white marble stairs towards some president.   The stairs in that film were supposed to be in this building. Moscow itself was centered in my consciousness around Smolenskaya Square. I also liked the ‘Tree topolya na Pluschihe’ movie (‘Three maple trees on Pluschiha Street’), but that story’s got nothing to do with the Foreign Ministry; they’re only related to each other in terms of distance.  When my feet are wet, I catch cold very quickly.  The ‘treat’ ahead of me loomed in my mind.  What am I doing this for?  Where am I hurrying to?  But finally I reached the street, and all that remained was for me to find the house.
   
- ‘I'm coming, baby!’ – a male voice called from above.   Then the front door opened and I saw Pete with his arms flung open for a hug. He stood there, enjoying the situation.  He smiled from ear to ear, and I could see that he had been waiting for me. He hugged me to him, clearly not thinking for a moment that I might not be quite so keen.

It was an ancient, spacious flat with high ceilings and windows decorated with stucco. I still remember that there was a warm wooden floor in the bathroom, because that was where I was sent first. The maid brought me a bathrobe and took my soaking pile of clothes.
- I won’t be long, Pete!
- It’s all the same to me now that you’re here at last, - he replied. I didn’t know what exactly he meant by that. I took a shower and dried my hair as well as I could. I was trying to be quick.

There was nobody in the sitting room. I looked into one of the many other rooms, with a beautiful pink Persian carpet on the floor and a chest of drawers probably bought in some European antiquarian shop. There was another door in this room, and I went over to it.  Just imagine, I was walking to and fro in an unknown apartment, wearing nothing but a bathrobe, playing hide-and-seek with Pete. But what could I do? My clothes had been taken from me on the pretext that it was raining outside. Somehow I had always trusted him. Our feelings towards others evolve without any effort on our part, as if they form entirely by themselves, and later on we introduce corrections and amendments to make them adjust to what we want or need.  In doing so we try to neglect the bad things – although a person’s eyes, smile, manner of shaking hands, voice and gait can tell you so much in just a few seconds. You can never recognize a true scientist by these features alone, however.   What do I mean by that?  I’m referring to one of two important notions from my childhood: the diplomat and the scientist.  The one can identify the presence of cancer in the human body.  Many of my family passed away because of cancer; my Grandfather died when he was only 54. My mother became quite a good doctor...

There appeared to be a bedroom behind the door, so I peeped into it. – Pete was not there, either. I went into other rooms. The flat appeared to have been rented out by some real estate agency; it certainly wasn’t homely, and it reminded me of a hotel suite.   And where is my bag? Should I call up people in my office? Well, I decided to return to the sitting room and to keep waiting. My knee ached a bit. I sat down on the sofa. There was a glass on the low table in front of me, a bottle of Evian mineral water, and two kinds of aspirin: one was UPSA, and the other was just ordinary aspirin.  Both pills had been put out on a little porcelain tray. It meant that I had wandered in the right direction. I chose the UPSA and poured out some water onto it.
A maid in an apron appeared in the doorway.
- Mr. Kent is coming, he sends his apologize.
- Bring me some tea please – black, with lemon.
- Of course.

She went out. She’s been hired by the agency as well, I thought. There was a volume of Shakespeare with a bookmark in it, the Russian edition of 1958 – exactly the same as the one in my parents’ study. There were a lot of bookshelves in this apartment, those in the corridor with tinted glass panels in front of the books. I picked the book up. It was a collection consisting of Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.   There was a bookmark in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  I can’t boast a thorough knowledge of the creative works of this classic, but ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is the title of the latest, extremely magnificent collection of jewelry by Van Cleef and Arpels. They had even sent a few copies of this book in English to our boutique so that we could brush up on the text to improve our sales patter.  When I was last in Paris, I saw the finished products and their models in the workshop.  Some of them had been produced in just one copy. We sold a few in the Louvre at Biennale – that box the queen bought, for example. 
The bookmark was on page 171.  I opened the book and read:
Flower of this purple dye, 
Hit with Cupid's archery, 
Sink in apple of his eye.
When his love he doth espy, 
Let her shine as gloriously
As the Venus of the sky.
When thou wakest, if she be by, 
Beg of her for remedy .
I understood everything at once.  It was very obvious who’d put that marker there.
- I’ve read it! – I called out for him to hear.
At that moment, the maid came in. 
- Would you like anything else? – She put down a tray with tea and a pastry on it.
- Call Mr. Kent please! I don’t have as much time as there is in this play, I’m afraid.   
The maid straightened her back. I was too anxious to pay much attention to her, but I did notice that she was a disciplined, well-educated woman of about thirty. Not anything special to look at, with no makeup and no manicure, but she struck me as a woman of character nonetheless.

In he cam at last! From his appearance I would never have guessed that he was an American, although I might have thought he was some special kind American of some special kind that I’d never encountered before.  His image was intrinsically refined.
- Stop, please, I want to have a look at you! – I cried, fearful that he would disappear again. I felt a bit helpless standing there barefoot in the borrowed bathrobe, totally out of my box in this strange place, with no idea what was expected from me.  My left hand knuckled in the pocket of the bathrobe.
- Kate, you are free for today, thank you, ¬- he said to the maid in English.
- Yes, sir. – She nodded in a military way, and left

- I hope that certain inconveniences and natural barriers, which I have had to overcome today in order to meet with you, will prove to have been worth the trouble – I said to him.
He made no reply. He was smiling. He came up to the table with the tray, poured a cup of tea out of the teapot and took a seat opposite me.
- My leg’s much better now. – I told him, seeing him looking at my scratched knee. – I was just wondering whether my clothes are ready.  This bathrobe is very cozy, but you look so impeccable, so perfect, that it reminds me of the old days.
- What do you mean by the old days?
- It’s probably a look in your eyes, - I sighed, with some difficulty. – You have always... or so it seemed to me, at least... you have always said one thing and meant another. I don’t really remember what you said back then, but I still remember the way you looked at me. I didn’t really like it, but I forgave you then. Now, it’s quite another thing.
- Will you forgive me this time?
- Now you won’t have it that way. Why should it be so? And another thing... – I went on with my reminiscences – Your behaviour still gives me the impression of a generous monarch, about to bestow some favour, but behaving with great caution even though that favour is meant for himself.
- We’re not talking about a mere favour, we’re talking about my salvation, beautiful.  – Pete smiled a radiant smile, the handiwork, no doubt, of some famous New York dentist over many years. 
- I think the time is ripe, if I read you properly – and trust me, I’m doing my very best to read you properly.  – This complicated situation, beginning with the meeting in Stockman, was beginning me down, although I can hardly complain that I lack experience of difficult situations. – I’m a little confused, - I nodded to the volume of Shakespeare, still open at the bookmarked page. – What terms are you on with Venus, exactly.
- We are old friends. I won’t tell you everything right now, but you know, I think it was she who initially inspired me to come here.
- So allegedly you yourself have nothing to do with all this?
- I was hesitating, wasting time.  Then all of a sudden, I found this book on some plane.  Because it was in Russian, it reminded me of you.  Our youth remains with us for the rest of our life
- Sure, Dream can be all about Russia. The fairies and elves in a thick forest… Titania can be Tatyana, Egaeus can be Oleg…  I don’t remember all their names.  But it’s all the same to God, - I finished – And do you need a sorceress?
- I won’t settle for anything less. You can go in there to change, - he pointed to the right, - you’ll find your clothes in that room.

I stood up and left the room. My clothes were dry and ironed. There were four packs of tights for me to choose from – all of them were the right size and color. The maid must have taken care of it. I put on the dress, feeling instantly better.
Pete stayed silent. He was waiting for me to stop worrying. I sat down on the chair in the room and began to think. I had the impression that they were using all their cunning to get me involved in some scheme.   I couldn’t get rid of this feeling.
- Pete, tell me everything at once. It’s obvious that you want something from me. I want to know what it is. There is no need for any introductions, hints or half-truths. I am here and I trust you. Tell me now, or I’ll leave! – I clenched my fist, and stared into his wide-open eyes.
- It is impossible to tell you everything at once, baby. – He stood up and began to unbutton his shirt. I saw a big scar all over his stomach, reaching up to the solar plexus. – I don’t know how long I have left to live, Sophie.
- Is it cancer? – I whispered, almost soundlessly. He nodded. I went over to him and embraced him.

I could nearly feel it with my body: it seemed that at that moment Eros appeared in the air – or, to be more exact, he shot out of the open book lying on the table like the cork from a bottle of Champagne.  First, Pete kissed my hair very carefully, then my face.  Finally, he kissed me on the mouth, and my dress slipped off my shoulders.   

In the morning, back at home, I made myself a cup of coffee, stirred a spoonful of honey into it, sat down into the armchair and began to drink quietly. Everything can be sorted out later: enough of thoughts, affairs, worrying about what I’m going to wear to work and when I should call the children. It felt as though somewhere deep inside me, shaking slightly, a warm pink ball was spinning round. Or perhaps it felt more like I was sitting in a pink cloud in complete silence, thunderstruck, full to overflowing. I couldn’t even get away from him for the length of a single cup of coffee.  We had talked and talked all night long; it was as if Pete felt like he’d suddenly been given permission to say what he needed to.  Well, I had asked him about it myself. He started his story at its end. Alicia had not been his wife. Pete had married her friend, who was already pregnant at the time of the wedding, and stunningly beautiful.  Although that’s the way so many men explain their marriages, almost as though they’re finding excuses.  And you never believe them.   She was in the real estate business, working for a New York company owned by her father. After she had given birth to her second child, she began to suffer from insomnia and fits of jealousy. He was constantly harassed. They began to quarrel and to live separately from time to time. When the children grew up, he left her for good. It’s always the same thing, no matter whether people live in America, in Europe and or in Russia.  He condensed twenty years of his life into three sentences. Of course, ‘life’ does not consist only of your private life, but your private life is the main source of worries and happiness. If you’re not living together, how can you bring your children up in the proper fashion?  Although maybe that idea’s wrong, maybe it’s not better that parents should stay together for the sake of the children.  I was thinking about myself. Well, a mother should always be with her child, probably – no, by all means. And no child should have a mother who is at a loss, neglected, with no means of living a fulfilling life; she should be free, she should have the right to choose and she should give her husband that right as well.  And he should take responsibility for his children. When a person is forced with someone against their will, inevitably lead to lies and illicit lovers; all this takes its toll on your life and health.  It’s a proble that you can’t escape from, no matter how absorbing your business.  What does it mean to live honestly? It can be measured on the money principle: I have returned everything, I have paid my debts, I don’t rely on another for food. But do the soul and the heart use that currency?  Do they measure their gains in banknotes decorated with portraits of political leaders and pictures of architectural sights? You can’t use money to wipe the tears of a child, and it won’t keep you warm at night. 

When thou wakest, if she be by, 
Beg of her for remedy.

He had bookmarked that phrase for me to read. I put aside the laptop which was on the low table opposite the armchair, stretched my legs out into empty space, drank the rest of my coffee and fell asleep.  The pink cloud was still there. 
 
- About two years ago, I had a business meeting with a Japanese man in Paris, at the Ritz.   We had been partners with him for a long time, and I had even met his wife, Yoshika. By the end of the meeting he had offered to go to ‘Van Cleef and Arpels’ to have a look at a bracelet and necklace set which he had liked, and which he had been thinking about buying for her. I couldn’t refuse; besides, the boutique is quite near to the hotel, as you’ll probably remember.
We were sitting on the bed in the bedroom.  I was dressed in a bath robe again. Pete was holding my hand in his as he spoke.

- Of course I remember it; I visit Paris at least three times a year.
- We sat down at a table in a VIP-room, and the manager brought us a tray with the jewelry.
- It must have been Jacque. He’s a bit taller than average, with chestnut-brown hair and a French curved nose.
- I am not sure that I remember him that well. But that’s not important. Can you guess what happened next? Or, to be more precise, can you guess what the manager brought to the
Japanese guy I was sitting there with?
- Well, it can’t have been anything bad, whatever it was.
- He offered him a coral necklace with black pearls and diamonds. Since that day, baby, I couldn’t stop thinking about you.  I called Ilya, just asked him how were things and so on. Sometimes we did business together; I’d found a couple of customers for his fund, and we’d also collaborated on the purchase of a plane – but that’s not really important.  I sorted things out with him, although I did think that Sergey could arrange my meeting with you more successfully than him. I told him something about Alicia, and that we were going to Russia. Ilya promised to call me back. I was wandering about Paris, amazed at my own stupidity. Why had I never asked about you, why had I never tried to see you? I had liked you so much in Tunis. Things like that don’t happen very often. I had to undergo medical analysis in order to be operated upon. The doctors advised me not to waste time. Only Alicia, my faithful friend, knew about it, may God forgive her!
- I am so sorry for her, Pete.
He did not doubt my sincerity.

- My mother learnt about it somehow. My operation was very difficult; I didn’t expect it to be so tough.  I was recovering with difficulty, but then one day, I lost hope.  I stopped eating. I just couldn’t eat, and that was that.  I looked like a skeleton. Nothing hurt, but I couldn’t eat a thing. I would lie there and think, sometimes listening to music. The psychologist talked to me every day, joked with me, tried to prepare me for a happy future. I stayed silent, listening to my music. You can’t survive on a drip for very long.   And all of a sudden I heard music by Tchaikovsky. I was weeping, Sophie. Every bit of the melody ran straight through me. I was listening to it, thinking of how I could go in search of you, even though I knew nothing about you now.  I pinned my hopes on that miracle, on that dream of new life. I began to eat again. I guessed that they were giving some pretty powerful drugs at the same time, but if it hadn’t been for that music, I would never have overcome my depression. 

I was sitting still, overwhelmed by his story. I could hear my intense heartbeat, and my hands were very cold.   The rain had not stopped outside, and now there was thunder too.   
- When I began to eat, I switched on my mobile again. Ilya called at once. He said that you were in Moscow, and that you worked at Van Cleef and Arpels boutique. It was just how things were meant to go. After Tchaikovsky’s music I was ready for any miracle to happen. I asked Ilya to film you. I left the hospital. I was alive once more, eating properly and waiting for the videotape to come.
- And weren’t you get disappointed? – I giggled.
- Are you wearing that bathrobe again? Is really that cold in my apartment?
I threw the pillow at him. That was an invitation nobody could refuse. The years before the present moment telescoped into a tiny point. There was no inner voice questioning my actions, no doubts, no warning signs. My mind switched off, at the mercy of my body’s chemical reactions.

I went to the kitchen, made tea for both of us, and we sat down to watch the tape.  The film had been mostly shot near Passage, where I worked.  There was an episode where I got out of the car and went to the entrance. I saw myself on Tverskaya street at one point. If I had only known that I had been being filmed for two whole weeks!
- Ilya must have guessed, - I suggested.
- He asked, and I told him that I wanted to see you. I told Alicia too.
- Tell me about her.
- She was a nice girl. She’d changed a lot since you knew her. She taught Arabic, and was fond of her students.  She married some historian and archeologist.
- There can’t be much excavation work in America ¬– I chuckled.
- Do you think I was really interested in that? He was always off in some far-flung place, like the Balkans, Afghanistan or Egypt. It’s unkind of me to say this, but he needed her money.  After Alicia inherited her aunt’s fortune she was very well off.   
- Did they have children?
- As far as I remember, he had a daughter.
- Oh well...  Pete, who will apologize to the people whose lives have been ruined by political situations?  – I took a slice of lemon out of the tea and put it in my mouth, peel and all. First it reminded me of Tunis, and second, nobody had offered me any supper, and I was now hungry.  – We should probably do it ourselves, - I said, answering my own question. – Life is harder still for beetles and cats. And even for little children. I’m sorry, Petechka!
- I’m sorry, baby! – Pete responded.
He had me down. I stroked my cheek with my palm. I felt so comfortable and at ease with him, like in a dream.


















































9

When I got up from the bed, I filled the bath with water, poured in some bubble bath and sea salt and told myself that half an hour wouldn’t make any difference. It was about three o’clock. The more tragic and imperative the motive, I thought, the more vehement and eloquent the deed.   When we find ourselves trapped within the social limits of common sense and delicacy, when unjustified pride and cautiousness prevent us from making decisions, when distance, weather, business, routine, and politics all get in the way – we sin against all that is holy, and bring down upon ourselves the curses of old age, indifference, and the inevitable impotence of the elderly.  Music turns to noise, poetry to na;ve jabber, a red sunset into a faded pattern on some old wallpaper. The soul grows dead to feelings, the heart becomes callous, the body suffers from complaints of which we barely know the cause.  The best we can do is to conjecture, to guess at the roots of the trials of old age.   Cities also belong to nature. We are allowed to create the city, to live in it, but we are punished because we fail to live as we should; everyone, in their own way, destroys their own happiness. Are our mistakes entirely obvious?  Are we being so foolish as to quench our thirst at the muddy puddle in the yard?  Whether that’s dangerous or not, we go ahead and do it.  Perhaps it’s the right thing to do, in some situations, but that’s certainly not always the case. 

I took a sponge and squeezed a drop of shower gel onto it. It was time to get going. What has Pete done to deserve cancer? In what way is he worse than Ilya, for example?  In what way is he worse than my ex-husbands, than murderers, than those stupid terrorists? Yes, they are stupid. Why did Alicia have to die? And as for Pete’s sudden appearance - he felt something and just rushed out here? No, it wasn’t like that. And I don’t know how it really was. Answers dawn on us much later on, or even in the afterlife: we think – oh, at that time you didn’t lend a helping hand when you could have done; in that situation you were used like an old piece of blotting paper, you followed the wrong guy, you failed to follow yourself.  There were clues, certainly. All those signs... I remembered the Englishman in Dubai. He was a pointer too.

I got dressed. I thought I looked pretty good in the end, wearing a white fitted shirt, turquoise cufflinks and grey trousers.  I got my new boots out.  Sometimes I like to play the man.  I applied some coral lipstick. I hadn’t had enough sleep, but there was a good reason for that.  I wish more of my reasons for sleepless nights had been like this one, but then again, who counted them? I carefully spritzed a bit of perfume on – my right wrist only, as there was a watch with a pink silk strap on my left wrist. In short, I got ready. I wanted to listen to a Marc Anthony CD in the car, but then I remembered that I’d left the car in front of the boutique, so I caught a taxi instead. I hadn’t called my foreign Prince as I’d promised him I would. But he hadn’t called either. He knew how to wait. And I would do the same for him. The distance between a man and a woman is a wonderful thing; it only exists as long as both ends maintain it.  Scout planes appear at either end of this long horizon, relaying messages from the East to the West, upholding the distance between them.  Now the word Intruder came into my consciousness.  The days of air defense were over, yet no new order had been established.  My thoughts became confused, and a strange sensation of pink mist prevailed.

Veniamin called on me in my office at six – a customer of ours, who looked thirty five years old at most. I talked with him till eight. I switched into a low gear and kept him talking. He always had plenty of time and money. I couldn’t guess what his nationality was. He didn’t have a Caucasian or a typically Russian look; his appearance wasn’t Slavic (not just because of his colouring), and he wasn’t Jewish, either.  He had a very relaxed, calm manner, and he didn’t even bargain, leaving money equivalent of five or six salaries of a medium-level manager each time he visited the boutique.  He asked us to lay something aside for him so that he could come back in a month to buy it. He was never in a hurry. Then he bought a brooch in the shape of a ballet-dancer made of chalcedony, sapphires, diamonds and white gold. I have never seen his wife or the woman for whom he chooses all these treasures, and I don’t want to – nine times out of ten I have been disappointed by the enigma unveiled, and often I then lose interest in both parties.  This is further proof that men have a different picture of us women than we have of ourselves.  They are never objective, if there even is such a thing as the objective perception of feminine beauty or, to be more precise, of its outward appearance.  They look for and choose something they lack, but they cannot put this into words. Ty mnye nuzhna in Russian… I need you in English – everybody uses their own language to explain the same thing. And can we blame them? Pete had already managed to say exactly that to me… You can’t make men look for something they don’t need, however objectively splendid it is. 

I sat down at the computer to check my email. Logic isn’t a good helper in these situations. Listen to your heart is a far better maxim.  In all probability, this is the very foundation on which the human happiness should be grounded; if you have a strong internal feeling, and you are aware of that feeling and have some idea what it means, you shouldn’t be afraid.  And if you see a red light? Then you should wait till the green light comes on. You can let your mind make the decisions about your career, as well as your cars, houses, clothes – let the mind choose, follow fashion and the latest technologies. But the mind’s role stops here.  Pete is asking for help, and he is hardly appealing to my mind, or my common sense.  He has enough of that in America, anyway.  Life flashes by so fast when we are so intent on the future.  Here it is, the long-awaited weekend – but then we get bored of having nothing to do.  We have forgotten how to simply be happy looking at the sky.  What we do well is running.  We run faster and faster, always trying to beat everyone else. 

- What did Alicia say to you when she called from the burning tower?  You were meant to be there with her, but you didn’t turn up – is that right?  You’ve been given an extension, Pete.  And your cancer will wait as well. – My words struck him like a lash.  Where had I learnt to talk like that? 
- I deserved that, Sophie. But I have accepted that I must live with it.  Death comes in the end and takes away all of us – it is just a matter of time.
- And why do you accept it? Don’t you have any other way out, or is there some other reason? What do you mean when you say you’ve deserved it?
- I can’t give you a definite answer to that, Sophie.  It’s a complex, comprehensive question – as complex as man, as complex as God.  Different people atone for the same mistake in different ways. 
- Who makes them atone?
- Why do you want to know that? Do you want to take it up with the Creator Himself? – He was speaking more seriously than I had expected him to. – I must have betrayed my soul. A man is like his soul. If your soul gets bored within your body, and no longer feels happy inside it, it can leave.  These aren’t my own ideas, I picked them up from someone else.
- But you still love yourself, don’t you, Pete? Have you forgiven yourself for your mistakes?
- Well, only those of them I understand. – He screwed up his eyes and drew me close to him.
Pete was tender – both sad and handsome at the same time.  The beauty of this combination was far from transient. 
- Baby, you know I always believed that this day would come, eventually. Like in Matrix Reloaded. – He smiled. – Will you press the keys?
- I’ll choose the thickest print, don’t worry. And I will choose a few words for you.
- Just don’t think. You shouldn’t think, ok?

He cut across me, stopping me from speaking out. For a moment it seemed to me that we were in Tunis again, over-excited by our youth and fear, that fear stemming from the sense that our relationship was being politically prohibited or some other silly reason from the past, feeling that even though we hadn’t had the proper chances, we had still outwitted everyone, and that now we were savoring that stolen chance. Our state of mind could be called passion, or absolute trust. Feelings pent up for years, hidden in the darkest corners of our souls, could vent themselves at last.  They sprang up spontaneously, fired by our internal instincts.  All by themselves, by the light of nature, born as naturally as a lion or a rhinoceros, or any other God’s creature on our wonderful planet.

I was clicking on the mouse-button mechanically, reading my messages: one from the office about the accounts, a confirmation of an order for some wedding rings, one about a forthcoming meeting of the managers of European boutiques in London, and on...

Dear Sophie,
I have managed to find a spare moment to write to you, a task I confess I have put off for a while due to a busy schedule and the impropriety of my confessions at our meeting.  I would hate it if you left a conversation that proved to be so important to me thinking that my disclosures had been mere eccentricity on my part. You can’t be expected to understand things like that totally out of context, and at the same time, you can’t judge a man you barely know on the basis of a single conversation with him.  I’m writing to ask whether you’d mind if we continued the discussion we began on that day.  Please reply with your answer.  You’re not under any obligation at all; the initiative, as you know, is entirely mine. 
Sincerely yours,
Simon
I was bug-eyed with surprise.  I re-read the email and hurriedly typed an answer:

Write to me with everything you want to tell me about. I remember you very well.

A difficult situation, I thought to myself, passing out into the hall.  A customer in tinted glasses with a pony tail decorated with wild flowers, dressed in horse-riding gear ; la Camilla Parker, was walking to and fro. She really did look as though she were right out of Buckingham Palace – or rather, the Palace stables. Her nails were so long that they probably merited a place in the Guinness Book of Records.
The woman gave me a friendly smile. She was trying to preserve an image of nobility, tolerating her inferiors.
- What’s new, Sophie?
She hadn’t visited our boutique for half a year, so the product range had changed significantly, or, to be more precise, it had been filled out with many more items.   
- Exalted tremor and eruption of the vexed volcano of my soul, this is what I expect from you, never forget that! I need a red flag!
She had probably said exactly the same thing in the stationary shop: it was her style, to memorize nonsensical quotations and recite them, delighting in the petrified reactions of her listeners.   But she did buy very expensive things.  She would usually sit down at the table with me for over two hours, drinking coffee, expressing her bizarre thoughts and eventually, as if excusing herself for having taken up my time, she would buy something.
- Viola! – Somehow I didn’t associate this woman with Finnish cheese anymore .  When you’re in one room with Viola, you can think about nothing but her.  – I bet there’s a new man in your life!
To her, this was an expression of the utmost friendliness. At fifty-seven she felt strong and healthy thanks to a new passion.  Her second husband had died of a bullet wound, killed by some business competitor; far from leaving her debts, his death had made her completely financially independent.  She owned houses in Spain and Switzerland, a maisonette in the center of Moscow, and something else in the Ural region.
- I have made up my mind to go into space, Sophie!
- I hope you be travelling alone? –I replied, matching her tone.
- Of course not. – She sat down in the armchair and turned to Marina, one of our girls.
- Would you prefer coffee or Moroccan tea? – Marina asked promptly.
- Coffee, please.
- So what kind of jewelry are you planning to take to the Martians? Let me show you what we have on offer. – I took out a key to unlock the showcases. – Something to make the little monkeys jealous. I expect they don’t even have pierced ears there yet?
- Maybe I should try on some of your changeable items. – She took off her glasses at last.

This gesture generally surprised anyone who didn’t know what to expect at this pint. She had bright, cornflower blue eyes that languished, as my grandmother once put it, remembering the eyes of her friend Sima, wife of an industrialist who became totally impoverished in the twenties. These cornflower blue eyes made her a real beauty. Emanuel, her cosmetic surgeon in Paris, had not only become her lover – he had wielded the tools of his trade so expertly that he really had managed to cheat time.  Not only did she have no wrinkles; there was no artificially strained skin anywhere on her face, and her ears were not scraped back at the sides of her head. 
I brought out a tray with jewelry: there were two changeable necklaces, which could be converted into earrings, bracelets and brooches.
- Are there no colored diamonds? – Viola frowned in discontent.
- We do have some, - I said slowly.
- Bring them here, dear. It’s not often that I go into outer space.
I went into the safe room.
She put a ring with a pink gem on her finger. There was silence. That ring was an object of pride for us.  We rarely let it out into the showcase, doing our best to protect it from cracks and the hazards of ladies casually trying it on – most people didn’t have the slightest idea how much it cost. 
- Well, yes... – the beauty said wistfully. Her mood was ruined. The price label on the ring swayed in time with her intense heartbeat. – I should think about transience of life. The Martians won’t be able to appreciate this properly.
- It is of purely human value, - I agreed.
- Well, my dear, today we won’t set such high goals. What else is there on the tray? What lovely things!
But the pink diamond had spoilt the show for her. She examined everything I offered her, and then left the shop having bought nothing.   
I thought you asked me for a red flag, madam?
The equestrienne had overestimated her abilities. The world, as usual, is boundless.

The cloud was loosening its hold on me little by little.  At last it dissolved entirely, and I found myself back on solid ground once more.  I asked for timeout, which Pete granted me. I was driving home quietly along familiar streets, letting everyone else pass, stopping at yellow light and giving alms to professional grannies. Rozenbaum  was singing about Saint Petersburg on the radio. I had seen him once in Dubai at the mall, where our boutique is situated. He was wearing tinted glasses with a cap pulled over his eyes, looking very serious. But he didn’t try to hide his moustache. I wanted to say a few kind words to him, but at the same time didn’t want to bother him. He had to go to such lengths to avoid recognition; he couldn’t even relax when he was abroad.  But then his songs hardly make any sense abroad – they are intended for Russian ears. He must have been hiding from the Russian fans who might have been shopping there. It was none of my business. Silently, I wished him every success.  I never changed channels once I’d managed to tune the radio into one of his songs.  My mobile rang.

- Hello, your majesty!
- I have been waiting. I had a bad sleep, Sophie. Are you alright over there? – My Prince was treading very carefully
- I’m fine.
He had never been aggressive with me, and we were quite fond of one another, both of us pretending to feel OK living such a long way apart.   
- When did you last have sex with your wife? – I wasn’t going any faster than fifty kilometers per hour.
- Is this a philosophical question? – He clearly sensed that I was about to tell him something.   
- Yes, it’s one of the questions of philosophical materialism.
- Have we got a new constitution, Sophie? Or has martial law been already declared?
Then he used the word intruder. I shuddered. I can’t bear lies in an intimate relationship. Lying should stamped out at the very beginning before it poisons everything around it. Mistakes that are dealt with in good time aren’t nearly so dangerous. It’s like little taking a sidetrack to a little village to have a gulp of cold beer. Because the weather is hot, and beer is not as strong as cognac: it’s ok to drink a little of it.  He had been telling his lies for over a year. And his wife had known about it for more than a month. There are a million stories like his in any city in any country.  Can I manage not to get messed up in such things?  Am I really messed up in them at all? 
- It’s not martial law. I’ll call you back. Bye. – And I hung up. I was almost home already, and I was searching a place where I could buy a bottle of water. 

The phone rang again.
- I said I’ll do it myself, – I told him.
- What will you do? – It was Pete, not the Prince!  Pete assumed that I was speaking to him, because I had been speaking to the Prince in English as well. 
- Well, what do you think I should do? ¬– I joked. – What are you calling me for?
- How long does timeout last here in Russia?
- Timeout in Russia is just the same as timeout in Ecuador - I began to fidget, worried that he would ask me who I’d been speaking to before.  My lying function was activated. 
-   Well, in Ecuador it only lasts a day, - Pete pressed.
- Maybe that used to be the case, but the rules are different now.  You have to apply to end a timeout.  You should attach two photos and a packet of biscuits.  – Being nervous, I was tempted to draw the conversation into senseless banter. 
- Should we buy some food for them too? – Pete seemed to be trying to joke along with me, but he hadn’t quite got the idea.
- No, there’s no need for that.
- And so where are we going? – He really didn’t get it.
- Ask your friend Venus about it. She won’t give you any faulty advice. – It seemed like I had got away with it.
- And should I ask her about the biscuits too? Are you in the supermarket, Sophie?
- I should probably go, but I want to sleep. I don’t need supper.
- I’ll call back tomorrow. And next time – look at the screen of your mobile phone before you answer it, please.
- I never look at it, Pete – I told another lie.
- I know. I’m kissing you on the mouth. I dream of seeing your sly eyes again.
- Is this meant to be a compliment in America?
- You know, you’re constantly making generalizations like that, as though you’re preparing some text for an encyclopedia. 
- And do you feel that you’re helping me?
- I like to be useful.
- You’re really very kind, Pete. I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye.

Well, am I wrong about all this?  What’s so bad about meeting up with Pete all these years later?   I had never forgotten him, but I had always known that we were worlds apart, separated by the ocean, by politics and by social status. Sometimes I couldn’t help associating him with some Hollywood star, someone unreachable you can dream about. That happens, of course, earlier, when you’re in your twenties. How could I have known that he was thinking about me too?  After that, my thoughts had turned to him during the most difficult periods of my life – when I felt lonely, disinterested, when I lost direction.  Yet last year, in California, when I was traveling around by car with the Prince, I hadn’t thought about him at all.  My Prince really is a good man; he’s never given me any reason to complain. 
I was at home at last.  In bed, I hugged my pillow and tried to forget about everything. 

The next day, I sat down to drink my cappuccino and to watch the florists decorating the corridor and the restaurant itself. That evening there was to be a celebration for the birthday of some high society girl.  Her black and white portraits, mostly nude, hung on the walls, and special lighting was being installed to show them off at their best.  As far as I could see, the place had been rented for the whole day. She was quite a beautiful girl. The whole occasion had probably been organized by a boyfriend or maybe her PR-manager.  Or both – that was more likely.  She must be some model, as it’s fashionable to refer to everyone these days.  It’s become a sort of umbrella term. 

I had eaten all the froth on my coffee.  A Chinese masseur once told me that a woman should drink a little milk each day. That’s why I now have a cappuccino each morning. There are so many different theories about what’s good and what’s bad for you: some say you should drink plenty of water, other warn you not to drink too much; some advise you to eat lots of fruit, while others advise you only to eat it before the main meal of the day; sometimes you hear that soup is essential, sometimes you hear it’s not particularly beneficial.   I remembered my best friend Veronika.  I had met her in Sofia during a very difficult period of my life.  She was someone who always enjoyed life, in any period.  She had been a wonderful creature.  She had traveled there all the way from Orenburg.  Without realizing what she was doing, she cured my mental sickness and soothed my overloaded brain.  She would feed homeless dogs in the street.  She owned a little women’s clothing shop in the city center, and there was always some mangy dog around for her to take care of. The two of us divorced our husbands on the same day. Sometimes things like that happen. Now she has got a new family and another child. Sitting there in the restaurant, I missed her, I wanted to talk to her. It’s no secret that I don’t have that many friends. I could tell Veronika anything, anything at all.  Maybe I could go to Sofia to spend a weekend with her?  Maybe we could eat baked paprika with Bulgarian brinzen, lutenitsa, stuffed grape leaves, potato with savory?

Stop! I realized I was giving way to my escapist tendencies. Some progressively thinking German woman would have gone to a psychoanalyst if she had been in my shoes, in order to analyse her situation. She would have got advice about how to turn her life around by opening her dream restaurant where everyone eats their favourite dish, a restaurant with some silly name like ‘The Cathouse’.  I did have a way out like that, I mean I did have an advisor like that –  Mr. Mikhail Olegovich Galperin, whose consulting services were pretty expensive. One visit to him ended any compulsion I had to analyze my life in that way. 

The florists had finished decorating the chandeliers with white lilies, their stems stuffed into little tubes hidden out of sight. I couldn’t decide whether the overall effect was beautiful or just luxurious. With flowers, you need to know when to stop.  I stood up, went over to the boutique and sat down at the computer.


Dear Sophie,
I know that I must really be beginning to impinge on your personal space, taking up your time like this.  But the short time we spent together convinced me that you are generous and open-minded.  In my youth I liked Leo Tolstoy very much, but I am only now beginning to understand why I loved his work as I did, and the meaning of the notion “Dialectics of Soul”. I am a grown-up, and I’m not in the habit of tend to idealizing society, or any single country or nation, even if there are certain nations more successful in terms of economy or culture during certain historic periods, although it’s hard to explain what we really mean by ‘culture’.  Well, I suppose that the things that resonate with our souls and correspond to our traditional standards are naturally more comprehensible to us. Our freedom is limited, and when it is not limited, we struggle to cope. Nonobservance of the law is punishable and basically senseless. So what we should strive for during our existence, doing our best to eliminate personal weaknesses, is to introduce improvements and changes to the law rather than to overthrow it altogether. Kutuzov won the victory not in 1805, but in 1812, because his victory during Patriotic War was a result of many people’s aspirations, and of the activity of the army and the nation. It was the nation’s general desire to win that victory. The overwhelming majority longed to win it. And Pierre was always endowed with a good luck, because he had a kind soul. Don’t be afraid of my Tolstoian ideas; they haven’t changed the world.  As you’ll remember, Leo renounced himself… well, there were a lot of other wonderful minds thinking about life, but not all of them did it on such a scale. Now is bigger. Globalization is not just a vague whim of the scientific community. Within the scope of political interests are survival, suppression and, of course, power (involving ideology, religion and so on). Well-to-do Europe is not so prosperous after all; powerful America is not so uncontrollably mighty; Russia, having survived shock and desolation, is not so hopelessly weak; in China the necessary changes for a fully egitimate dialogue are underway, and petrodollars are no longer spent on thirty-bedroomed Palaces and limousines with golden bumpers.  When I write to you I am not constantly thinking about the fact that I am an English man and you are a Russian woman.  At least I do not feel that I am….

I noticed the icon for a picture attachment at the bottom of the message.  On any normal day, when I wasn’t in the process of trying to collect my thoughts into some semblance of order, trying to prevent them from jumping from Pete to the Prince, from Tunis to the boutique (where there was plenty of urgent work for me to attend to), I would have read on to the end of his email. There was a difficult, indecisive deal over a diamond necklace underway, and I was meant to be going out for a meal with Adam, who had arrived from St Petersburg a week ago – I was supposed to be putting a little pressure on him to loosen his hold on some of the contents of his bank account. If it hadn’t been for my agitated state of mind, I wouldn’t have opened the photo at that point – or I would have realized a little quicker whom it was that I was looking at.

She was smiling, sitting in a wicker arm-chair in front of a pale beige curtain.  In the window you could see a blue sky with clouds. She was dressed in a pistachio dress with a V-shaped neckline. I sat in front the screen frightened, not moving, my mouth hanging open. I zoomed in on the picture to see her face better. I was looking at it for a long time. Gone was any curiosity about the rest of the message.  I forgot what I had been reading about. I was smiling quietly, resignedly.   All these symbols... I pressed the ‘Print’ button and printed the whole thing out, including the portrait. I folded the paper four times. She had a butterfly necklace on her neck, too. Not quite like mine, but that didn’t really matter.

-  Adam! – I heard Lena speaking behind me.
– Put the necklace on the new tray, - I whispered to her.
- Sonia, I’ve come back to hear the verdict. Don’t try to persuade me, please. Let’s eat out together, drink some good wine. I’m going to marry for love. I’ve brought you an invitation... will you be able to fly? My secretary will send you the tickets and all the other bits and pieces.
- Where exactly is the celebration going to be? – I inquired cautiously.
- I won’t be original.
- You must have chosen Paris. – And it’ll be the third wedding held in that magic city in the last two years - I thought.
Adam accepted the ten percent discount, which didn’t amount to much.

I felt much better, thanks to the wine and his cheerful talk. I sat down on the sofa in the corridor. But can we really be happy for others? We have been always taught to help those in need, to be compassionate, to surrender your only possessions to others, to rush out in the middle of the night in order to save another – but only occasionally, as if in a footnote, are we told to try to accept someone else’s joy or happiness as our own.  That’s something that’s much harder to do.  If you can, you are truly blessed. It’s much easier to trip someone up than it is to open a door  and not to walk through it too – to simply let someone go, when they are out of breath with their good luck, dazzled by their success, laughing and smiling to have reached their goal – and to say, simply, just go, my friend, your happiness is my happiness. If you do say something like that, ninety percent of people will think that there’s some hypocrisy involved, and the other ten percent will pretend that they haven’t even noticed your gesture, and they won’t discuss it later. They won’t dare; at most, they might manage a feeble rendition of your generous sentiments – ‘you know, I’m so happy for Bella’. Throughout my life, I have often been the object of envy.  I haven’t always been good at determining where a jealous feeling is coming from, but as soon as I did determine that, I would find it difficult to deal with. I have always detested arrogant women, boasting openly in public, advertising their charms and skills, shouting about their position or the bounty of their (often fictitious) lovers. The people who are really well-to-do don’t need to point out where their expensive apartment is located; they don’t need to squawk about things like that. If you’re living in an apartment that costs ten million dollars, as well as three thousand a month for the upkeep of the entrance hall, why on earth would you be working at a medium-level company on a mediocre salary?  It’s such a shame that most people can’t see the impression they actually produce – if they could, they wouldn’t make fools of themselves, and they would save a lot of wasted energy.  I know that I am often thought gullible. Sometimes I even surprise myself when I tell someone, quite honestly, about my salary, or answer some question I’d be better off keeping quiet about. I can also be sly when I need to be. But I can’t stand impudence and rudeness, especially in interactions with subordinates; I also hate when women make fools of men. Anyone who displays those faults immediately loses my trust.  There is such a notion as a ‘decent person’, and that doesn’t necessarily mean generous or honest; ‘decent’ is closer to ‘noble’.  It’s difficult to be really ‘decent’, but both men and women can reach that goal if they really want. But how could I forget about Pierre Bezukhov  and the letter?!

...Well, you know, Sophie how surprisingly, how inexplicably easily, I have told you about intimate and very important events of my youth, in the same way as you sometimes find yourself able to vent your emotions to a stranger sitting beside you on a plane, safe in the knowledge that you will never see them again – you don’t even need to know their name. But you introduced yourself to me, and I gave you my card.  When I come to Moscow (which I will do once again as soon as I have some spare time) I like to watch people, because they are so different from the people in my country; I look for the traits of the genotype that prevails in your unique and sophisticated culture – and I mean culture in the broadest meaning of the word. Moscow is no less cosmopolitan than any big city; the only difference is that a different group of nationalities is to be found their compared to the ethnic pools in Paris and London.  The way it looks at the moment, Moscow isn’t quite accustomed yet to all its innovations, starting with the shops and the restaurants and ending with the changes to the residential areas. But no repairs, and no fancy French desert can conceal a city’s desire to aspire to the best, and to achieve that aim in its own way.  I like these changes so much!  Society is becoming polished.  I can see that by looking at my own tourists – that is, by looking at Russian tourists from our hotels in here in Dubai.  But this isn’t what I wanted to tell you about.  It was a real pleasure to meet a woman like you. There’s just one detail, however, which has bothered me since the very first minutes of our acquaintance. I hope you’ll take this in good humor; I hope you’re perceptive enough for my confession. 
Sincerely yours,
Simon

His emotional narrative left me breathless.  I looked at the photo again, and it was only then that I turned my attention to the inscription under the photo.  ‘Gina’ was written there.   
Well, you don’t often meet Englishmen who appreciate Russian culture.  More often than not, Europeans see our country as a stabilized, post-Soviet component of World Economy, in charge of consignments of raw material for world production – include the vital resource ‘labor’. Simon was a very surprising man!  I remember a friend of mine who had a ‘Lalique’ crystal vase – it was big and very beautiful, but there was a tiny crack. As a rule, any faulty product from this company, irrespective of its cost and size, is destroyed at the factory. This vase must have cracked at the shop, and my friend got it at a very reasonable price – it cost a good deal less than three thousand dollars, which was the original price. But when she filled it with water, the crack began to grow and eventually, the vase split into two halves. Dancing Bacchantes. It seemed to me that Simon had a similar crack on his soul, and that he was trying to get rid of it, to attain spiritual purity, to understand something – like someone concealing a dirty military past littered with the burnt villages of aborigines.  He was trying to hide some psychological desolation. But there was obviously nothing ‘humorous’ about his message. Although, with their English humor you never know... Sometimes you have to know “the importance of being earnest”.

Julio Iglesias was professing love to the rhythms of the tango as I walked along the corridor, having finished work for the day. At first I felt as though I was dancing with Prince, then with Pete, while over in another corner of the hall Simon was there with his Gina. The hard work was over.  Adam’s purchase allowed us to complete our financial plan – we could relax until the end of the month. Should I visit mum? I wondered.  I got into my car, drove up to the traffic lights, and turned off in the direction of Pete’s. 

Kate opened in her snow-white apron and blue uniform. They must be making proper servants’ uniforms somewhere, with the pearl buttons and the round-shaped collars.  She was wearing soft black low-heeled pump shoes. She took my coat and scarf. Pete was standing in the doorway of the parlor; I could see a blue silk dotted necktie. When I was much younger, I saw Andrey Voznesensky  sitting in the ‘October’ Cinema House, just one row away from my seat, watching some new film being shown at the Moscow International Film Festival. He had had a necktie like that too. I remember very clearly that Voznesensky had squinted at me. At the time, it seemed to me as though he would have come over to me if the lights hadn’t dimmed – we would have met had it not been dark. Society was simpler then. But that was probably in my imagination; maybe he was never thinking about speaking to me. He visited our gallery last year, or at least he visited the restaurant, with Alla Pugacheva .  I sent him a little souvenir from Van Cleef and Arpels – the sort of thing we give all our major customers. Later, I saw him leave, carrying the parcel I had sent. And what about a talk? Well, read my poems and find the answers you’re looking for in them. But I can’t answer all your questions. Rhyme, metre, strophic and phonic theory... stadiums… sense.  You have to know what to ask a poet about.  It’s a pity that I’ve never met Brodsky . “The foreign land is kin to Motherland just like the space is close the dead alley.”  I pay attention to such things and I am “not convinced in anything” .

I went over and took Pete’s necktie.
Men jump to their own conclusions if you take their clothes off when you’re barely inside the house.   

* * *
- Maybe you could live with me for a while, Sophie? – Pete asked quietly, whispering into my ear. 
I pulled the blanket up to my chin, and said:
- You mean “live with me while I am here, and then go back home again”.
- And how ought I to have asked you about it? – He was trying to look surprised. – Have you got another relationship? I can’t believe that a woman like you doesn’t have a man in her life.
- I should probably tell him that I’m not to be disturbed as long as I have my American visitors. 
-   There are problems everywhere, - Pete smiled.
- Maybe we should make a list of them? Then we can shoot them down one by one. And when there’s only one left – we won’t kill it. We will simply make it kneel down.
- It would be better to make it assume doggy-style. – He was still smiling.
- It depends on the situation. If it’s really small...
- You could also say ‘silly’….
I felt so good with him once more – just the way I like it.
- Sergey said that he met you in Kyoto once.  He said you were interested in jewelry.

We were sitting opposite one another, eating a tasty mushroom soup.  Kate must have been an excellent student at her school for housemaids.
- I have been interested in it my whole life.  I told you in Tunis that my mother took me to the boutiques with her as a child. – Before meal he swallowed his pills, probably of Swiss or American origin, as surreptitiously as possible.   
-  Well, my mother took me to the doctors plenty of times, but I didn’t become a surgeon.
-  It’s a shame. If you had, you’d have been very useful to me right now! – Pete was trying to joke.
- I am not cut out for the lancet. – I ate a little, and pushed on with the original conversation:     - It must have been pearls that you were interested in if you were in Kyoto. And what was Sergey doing over there? Just fancy that, both of you there at exactly the same time.  It’s amazing – not in Tokyo, but Kyoto… you meet by chance in a country with a multimillion population.  I suppose that Ilya probably dropped in too. – I looked into his eyes.
- Well, how would we manage without Pekarsky? – And he looked back at me, straightforwardly, plainly – it was difficult to outplay him.
- Well, of course, there is Yakutia in Russia – I ate my soup, looking at him all the while.
- For me in Russia there is you, prior to anything else. -  He didn’t withdraw his gaze; he seemed to manage to find some place on me that no one had ever seen before, and he penetrated me with his eyes until I was actually feeling pain. He spoke in such a way that I could not even contradict him, even silently; I sat there, stunned by his quiet, simple words.

There isn’t so much that happens to a person’s private life. Two or three of such meetings are enough to break down our barriers, and the doors inside our hearts begin to open – one by one, until they all stand flung wide.  And then two souls can begin to coexist.  At this point, consciousness steps in to administer its analysis – too late, however. It attempts to make calculations, to make sense of things, to work out what is needed, what is useful; it strives for an objective view of the situation, inspecting everybody’s character, customs, education, psychology - but souls aren’t usually interested in these details. They don’t care about hair color and complexion, or what size trousers someone takes; a soul cannot understand why a man should be ashamed of having a woman ten years older than him, or why the woman tries to hide the fact that her man used to be a taxi driver. When he is sitting in a warm bath screwing up his eyes so she can wash his hair with fragrant shampoo, when they are speaking tender words to one another and moaning softly like contented animals – then the world belongs to them, because it was created for happiness, and it exists only because the two of them transmit the energy of their happiness into space, which derives its energy from love alone. 

I remembered his operational scar. I remembered him as a young man, embracing me in the boat when we had been fleeing from Karkana island. I saw myself at a crossroads in my life with two children to support; his coral beads, which I had kept with me the entire time.
- You have helped me so many times throughout my life, but you know nothing about it – That was all I wanted to tell him about myself. I don’t like the past, I just leave it to the fate.  You never get the good times back, and the bad times shouldn’t be repeated or continued.  They say that old women dream about their youth, and that the really elderly dream about their childhood – but that until the time when you start dreaming about those things, you still have something to live for. 
- Well, there is Yakutia… and also, underground Moscow. – He made as though we were merely chatting with one another.
- You mean the subway? – I knew that he didn’t mean the subway, and I also knew that he was about to lay down the cards. I found that I was so afraid that everything I felt for him might get ruined in just ten seconds, lost to the bottomless precipice of sordid, mundane profit-making. Was this all just about some successful deal as part of a well-planned piece of business, a search for the treasure of the past buried in the Moscow ‘underground’ – as if we were characters in some low-rate detective story, in which the threads of the plot eventually weave their way into one big dirty cesspit of mercenary desires as soon as the motive is identified. I wanted to wind the film back, to stand still, to hide.

- Sophie!
- What?
- Get that right out of your head. Everything you were thinking about just now is nonsense. Do you hear me?
- Are you telling me to forget it all just like that?  That I shouldn’t be even the slightest bit afraid?
- No, - he said, as if he was considering my words – Of course, I didn’t know how I could meet you. So many years have passed.
- Can it be that men sometimes have intuition too? – I must have looked radiant with happiness, like a child about to go for a whirlwind ride on a carousel… not a spoilt child, though – one who has been looking forward to a holiday with her father for a long time.   
- Sometimes it does happen that a man finds the woman – the woman without whom the whole world is dull for him. 
- That means that the world doesn’t only belong to men, – I had an unexpected insight of my own. 
-  And if you have the wrong woman is by your side, it’s better to be alone.
-  And if the right woman is not by your side?
-  By your side means first of all that she is on your mind, when you are sitting on the beach in your sports trousers...
-  And you have your mashies beside you, and all you can think about is her... – I broke into beginning of his pretty little story
- You’ve had your share of disappointments, baby.
- My way hasn’t always been smooth  - I nodded. – There have been rivers to cross, mountain passages covered in snow, the burning desert sun to combat, dark, thick forests… but I’m not the sort of person who turns off the road when the going gets tough.  Who cares about strong winds?  It’s not the first time that I’ve had to withstand a blast.  You shouldn’t worry about me. 
- I am not like the wind. – His voice sounded very resolute.
- So, who are you, then?
- That understanding must come easily and naturally. Only you yourself can sort this out. – He was trying to speak calmly. – Or it won’t be a true understanding. – It still seemed to me, however, that he was trying to impart some other meaning with his words.  Then he asked me: - Have you ever been to Las Vegas?
-Yes.

I had been there with the Prince for a few short days. Every night we had played poker, after watching a show. I hadn’t wanted to sleep at all; my thoughts had been wonderfully lucid even very late at night, and the fever of risk had been irresistible. All the halls had had extra oxygen added, the air conditioners were blowing the entire time – I felt as though I was at a mountain spa resort.  Polunin  had been the unsurpassed celebrity in the “Cirque du Soleil” performance at the Bellagio hotel. The acrobats had jumped from an enormous height into a little puddle of water – just like rockets. There was no real narrative thread – the performance was just meant to be watched and enjoyed, something we certainly knew how to do. What a spectacle that had been! It wasn’t spiritually inspired, but it had been a masterly show, perfect to the last detail. Polunin had made things a little bit more lively, yet at the same time he remained slightly robotic.  In my childhood, there was a very different kind of clown at the circus, to say nothing of the bears on the bicycles. Half of the artists had had Russian surnames, but the audience didn’t seem to register this – there are so many different names in America, and nobody really pays any attention to them. It is an American circus if the performance is staged in America. Now and again I found myself wondering about the budget of such an extravagant two-hour show.  But there was little point trying to work it out; there had been over a hundred registry desks for the visitors and you could get lost in the lobby alone. Amusement machines had been installed even in the bathrooms: the moto was don’t waste time; enjoy yourself whenever possible .On the first day I won seven hundred dollars and told the Prince that I was going to the Chanel boutique to buy a pair of shoes. My thoughts became simplified; all I cared about was sleeping, playing, watching and spending. I felt as though my brain had not only been washed, but sterilized as well. When I got back to the table, a blonde woman with red lips was sitting with my Prince, in a miniskirt and fishnet tights. She saw me and left the table.
- She’s from Saratov, - the Prince said. – I gave her a couple of chips and wished her good luck.

There had been such an enormous queue for Celine Dion tickets that we would have been stuck in it for two hours, so we didn’t bother with it. Instead, we went to see the Grand Canyon from a little airplane. Other than us, all the tourists on the plane were Japanese.  There was a young couple in front of us: she was talking and laughing all the time, adjusting his plait, stroking his shiny black hair. The Prince had called her a geisha girl. She spoke with us a little, giggling all the time, and then she turned to me and told me that her husband was very scared of flying. His ancestors had clearly not been Samurais.   
- I get scared, too, - the Prince said.
And so I stroked him on the head just like our geisha girl was doing. The Japanese guy perked up.
Why on earth had Pete asked me about Vegas?
- Pete, can I go home?
He nodded.
I went to the bedroom, thinking about my Prince. I began to dress myself, tears pricking my eyes. Pete was in the sitting room, a newspaper rustling in his hands. I came up to him already wearing my shoes, my bag in my hand.

- He must be a good man, Sophie.
- So are you. -  I couldn’t think of any other answer.
- The first time I met Ilya in America, it was in this darned Las Vegas.  He was there with his old Armenian friend. As far as I can remember, his name was Alabyan. Yes, he was Alexander Alabyan.
My fingers lost their hold on the bag, and it fell to the floor. The contents were scattered all over the place; it had been very full. Instead of picking it all up, I sank to the floor next to the heap of junk and paper scraps, making no attempt to pull myself together in front of Pete. 

- And what was the outcome of this other chance meeting? – I made myself ask.
- I was so pleased to see him, and we began to meet up from time to time. He had quite good connections in Washington.
- Well, not in Texas of course. – I tried to cheer up after the dramatic news. – He must have felt quite at home even at the United Nations.
- In New York we met with Sergey by chance, as you put it.
- Where exactly? Just in the street?
- No, at a jewelry auction. Two brooches by Verdura were being exhibited there.
- Falco Santo Stefano della Sarda, the Sicilian duke, my favorite jeweler! – I exclaimed.

That was true. From reading any articles I could find about jewelry, and scanning all the insufficient sources on the subject that I could find in our bookshops, I found that I was particularly attracted to two companies above all others, Van Cleef and Arpels and Verdura – preferring them for the delicacy and virtuosity of their designs, for their boldness, humor, irony, and artistic taste.  The unexpectedness of the technical solutions of Verdura has always delighted me. Their jewelry is characterized by a style of aristocratic magnificence, and the slightest detail – like the curve of a leaf or a flower – can really surprise. I read in some book about this artist, that his achievements are way in advance of his epoch, that his aesthetic standards are staggeringly high, and that he has attained a top level in the world hierarchy of glamour – and all this fitted the opinion I myself had formed of him. Chanel appointed him to the top position in her jewelry department within six months of his arrival and never took off his two bracelets with Maltese crosses – not only did she recognize him as a master, she also unwittingly inspired his courage, his revolutionary spirit, his innovative approach and his disrespect for well-established rules.  With him, she shared her secrets of flattery, essential for interacting with the people who were going to own the masterpieces he had created; she was a real expert at that. There were rumors that he fled to America in the middle of the thirties, trying to escape from her. He wanted freedom. He was ready for independent achievements, and new opportunities were calling to him. Masterpieces with a ‘Verdura’ label – the inscription was printed in tiny square letters – are now real treasures for collectors and jewelry traders.

- Is he really your favorite jeweler? – Pete brightened. He had realized that I was going to stay, although I myself didn’t realize it at that point. 
- Well, in any case, he’s one of my favorites. He’s like a good joke that makes a pompous party with all the respectable guests not pompous, turning their polite talk into an easy and animated discussion of their lives.   
- All my mothers’ ‘Verdura’ jewelry is decorated with sapphires.
     And it’s such a pity that we were not allowed even to know about anything like that, I thought, although I refrained from speaking my thoughts aloud. 
- I don’t think that Sergey can boast a similarly long acquaintance with the works of the masters.
- He has quite an eye for good jewelry, you know. He does have some intuition. He understands beauty, if you can even talk about ‘understanding’ beauty – I suppose I should say that he perceives it.   
- You mean that Sergey is more sensitive than the other one?
- He is also more humane, to be honest with you. Ilya is far more pragmatic.

- Well, yes, it’s a complementary partnership. – Inwardly, I agreed with him on this point. Sergey has always been aesthetically tuned: he would never eat if the table wasn’t laid correctly; he likes ballet; he has always been polite and courteous “with the ladies”, as my grandmother put it – although he was perfectly capable of beating someone up, if they insulted his honor or the honor of his friends. And his appearance has always been impeccable. He never writes poetry, unlike Alexander Block , but he does read poems form time to time.  In his room there were books by Yesenin, Tsvetaeva, Rozhdestvensky  and from time to time, I would see a copy of Shakespeare. This bizarre mix exhausted the range of books we could borrow from the library at the Centre of Culture. Ilya would scan newspapers and, on occasion, Inostranka  magazine. We were pressed for time then – because we were always studying, or making surreptitious trips to the cinema – it wasn’t easy to get hold of video cassettes at the time. Once, Ilya organized an evening showing of a movie called ‘Paradise Hotel’, or maybe it was called ‘Dream’ – anyway, the first real porn film I had ever seen. It was probably Pete who supplied the cassette, and we watched it in Kryshkin’s residence. None of the male viewers made it to the end, which was only to be expected, given our age and all the fresh air we’d been getting….

- You know, I guessed about you and Sergey in Tunis –
- That relationship ended there, - I said, in order to make it really clear for him.
- I went to Tunis to relax, and to find myself some entertainment. I wanted to live far away from New York for a while, but I ended up getting a big kick in the head with a tomahawk. 
- Who injured you like that? – I laughed.
- Jealousy. It was killing me. – He began to move towards me, slowly. – I knew that should I try to approach you, you would be sent back within a week – and the worst of it was thinking that my behavior might result in some negative record in your biography. Although Alicia thought that you were intentionally seducing me.
- And so she decided to focus on Ilya.
- Silly girl! – Pete remarked, but kindly. – We were so na;ve then! Or maybe not. Youth is much better than a shabby antiquarian table filled with cracks, even if it has been laid with coffee and cream for influential officials.
- Although there aren’t many tables like that. They can be beautiful and respectable; it’s better than being used for firewood, or as a resting place for a bowl of shrimps and beer bottles.
- Better for a table to have beer on it than to be used by an elderly widow dripping with diamonds for her games of patience – He came very near to me. He took off my shoes.
- By the way, we were talking about an auction, - I reminded him.
- Sergey had some Russian customers who were interested in antiquarian jewelry, - Pete continued. -  I told him that I could get hold of some sapphire Verdura items, and he offered me a powder compact, which I ended up buying from him. It was a wonderful thing! Later, I offered some other things to him, and introduced him to some of the collectors.  He was very pleased by this. As far as I remember, his customers were in Europe – mostly in Geneva, Monaco, Paris.
- Our Monaco boutique earns half of the amount of its money turnover on sales to Russian customers, - I added.
- I can’t believe that I have your feet in my hands, baby. That I have come to Russia and found you.
How could I fail to trust that? How could I resist the temptation, draw his hot hand away and not look back into his eyes?

I am convinced that we have an inner “ego” that stays silent most of the time, sitting quietly inside us, collecting information. At times, this little ego steps in to make decisions for the louder, bigger ‘Ego’ that we are used to listening to. For example, it decides whom to dance with. Sometimes the little ego behaves quite unexpectedly; it begins to like things, people, whom the bigger Ego has never thought about, or only thought about briefly, in an abstract way.  I noticed that my most careless wishes are the ones that come true most often: it’s such a beautiful house and oops, I am living in it! What a nice car, but I have no money to buy it, I’m just admitting that I like it, - and oops, later on I find myself buying it! I had thought about Pete for many years, as if I were abstractly thinking about somebody else’s life. I had never tried to meet with him, just living my own life, dreaming seriously about other men, flirting with other men – and oops, there I was, I was sitting on the floor of his apartment, surprised by my own thoughtless body. There was something about it.

We went back to Pushkin restaurant for breakfast. I enjoyed the smell of the coffee and freshly baked pastry. We were sitting at the table on the first floor.
- The design of the upstairs hall here is so interesting. The tables upstairs are covered with green cloth, just like in a casino - Pete said all of a sudden.
- Well, yes. They have tried to furnish the room in the style of the 19th century, and at that time almost everyone played cards at home. It’s a trivial detail for the truly erudite. Both Pushkin and Dostoyevsky played cards. But they weren’t great players, although they were fond of playing.   Their creativity prevented them from being obsessed with cards, although their work was often interrupted by card games, if you like. One of the masterpieces of your favorite Tchaikovsky is the Queen of Spades opera. It was based on the plot of a story by Pushkin’s. Do you want me to buy tickets to the Bolshoi? – I suggested.
- The hero was Herman, if I remember rightly - Pete sort of surprised me. – It was a sad story. There is nothing fun about cards. It’s a devilish passion. I have always disliked that sort of atmosphere. I have got certain business partners in San Francisco who would ask us to organize business meetings in Las Vegas. That is why I was there - he answered, before I could ask another question.
- Did you go there alone?
- Well, yes. I had quite a few meetings there, and I made up my mind to spend no more than five hundred dollars. By the time I met Ilya, I had spent all my money.
- Tell me in detail what Ilya, and especially his friend, talked with you about. What’s his name again?
- Alexander. He is a charming person. You sense right away that he is a talented psychologist.
- Could he guess what you were thinking, or something like that? – I asked.

- Well, no... although he was probably doing exactly that. When we went to the restaurant, he commented on all the players at the table. I liked his way of thinking, as well as his excellent sense of humor. I always appreciate that in people. At supper, he told me a story about a famous Russian player of the 19th century, who had been truly phenomenal – he had been so successful that he could block some of his opponents’ chakras using a technique involving color waves. Each of our chakras is connected with a certain color, you know.
- And did he explain to you how the guy did it?
- That player had a pin with a big sapphire in his tie.
- Later on, this sapphire was worn by Onassis, and then by his daughter to negotiations – it’s a famous GB -folklore story. I am sure Ilya’s nice little friend didn’t bother to point that out, considering the information he’d already been privy too.  He must have known about your mother’s collection and her affection for sapphires. Or maybe he had brought some items with sapphires from the Soviet Union. I can’t believe that he went all the way to Las Vegas to meet you with no real purpose in mind?
- I was waiting for some interest from him, but honestly speaking, he never showed any at all – He took my hand into his.
I had been wearing my ring with a black onyx flower with tiny diamonds in its middle on my right little finger for several years already. It was the first thing by “Van Cleef and Arpels” that I bought; production of that line is now discontinued.
-  I think you understand why I am here, - Pete remarked.
-  Because Pack shot at you.
-  And I am so grateful to him. – he added: - Onyx symbolizes power, my dear. – He said it, and then kissed my fingers.
- I hope it won’t spoil me. – The sensation of his kiss comforted me. – Once a man came into our boutique – he was looking at onyx brooch for a long time.  Then he asked about its price and said that out of principle he wouldn’t pay so much for it. What principle was that?  It turned out that the whole of his staircase was made of onyx, including the rails. 
- He must be a big boss, - Pete smiled.
- You mean, how much power he has proportionally to the staircase? I think each step stands for another promotion in his career.
- I didn’t think of that. – He patted his forehead. – People usually go to Tibet, Mecca, Israel, Mount Athos… and I have come to Moscow. It is so interesting for me here.  I just walk along the streets...
- It’s so hard to tell what another person is really up to. – It seemed to me that he was struggling to explain his feelings. 

- You dropped some email at my place. – He took Simon’s message folded four times out of the pocket of his jacket. I remembered the way the contents of my bag had gone everywhere when I heard about that meeting in Las Vegas.
- Give it to me. – I put it back in my bag hurriedly. Pete did not react to my haste in any way. I wondered whether he had read it, or at the very least just peeped into it? Of course, it’s rude to read letters that aren’t addressed to you. Why wouldn’t he ask me about my plans for the immediate future? I thought our relationship had become intimate enough for him to ask me that.   
He said something, but my telephone rang.
- I am in Domodedovo Airport, my beauty. I’ve missed you so much!
- No – are you really?! I’m waiting for you, - I said in a strange voice. I stood up at once, then sat down again. Pete was looking at me sadly, with understanding. 
- I haven’t answered your question. – He grew sadder, probably still hoping that he had misinterpreted something...
- I have to go to him.  He’s traveled here by plane…– I answered, not sounding anything like myself.   
- Happiness is so transient, baby.  Just go...

That “go” resounded in my mind as though rung out by a bell tower, standing alone in the middle of a vast field, surrounded by dry yellow grass waving like ocean waves in the strong wind of a coming storm. Images like that pop into my mind when I am confused or taken aback. I imagined the unbearable poignancy of how it would feel to look into the blue eyes of my Prince, angry with myself for getting into such situation...
What have I done? How can I sooth my troubled soul? I can’t make any choices now!
I took a taxi to where my car was parked and went home. I took a shower automatically, touched up my make-up, put on my house clothes, opened the door mechanically. Then the autopilot function was deactivated…. 














10

Ilya came into the boutique instead of Sergey. He scanned the showcases with his usual, expressionless look and sat down to drink coffee with me in the corridor.
- Did you know that Pete has left? – he said abruptly, with nothing by way of introduction.  He was making it very clear that he knew all about our relationship. 
- Yes, I did know that. – There was no point trying to outsmart him. It would have come as no surprise to me if he told me exactly how many times I’d stayed over at Pete’s, and where we’d gone in Moscow. 
- I hope you haven’t come here to find out why he left, - I continued.
- Let’s say that doesn’t interest me – He screwed up his eyes, as if he were sighting down the barrel of a gun.  He didn’t give a damn about Pete and me.  I didn’t want to come clean with him about what had happened, although he did seem as though he were at least trying to be friendly.  – Pete’s mother died a week ago, - he told me.
I straightened my back, suddenly feeling tense and upset. So many sad things all at the same time, - I thought, trying to suppress my rising feeling of guilt.

Ilya continued to talk in his monotonous voice:
- She was a close friend of Alicia’s aunt. They studied together at a girls’ boarding school in Europe.   The aunt had no children, and no other nephews and nieces. At the age of forty-five she became the widow of a former English colonel and moved to America. Her husband had made his money by selling Indian jewelry. He was the owner of a big lapidary factory, and selling precious stones was an occupation that kept him busy for as long as he lived.   Alicia was sent to Tunis along with Pete in the hope that he would fall in love with her and subsequently marry her. Her devoted aunt was going to give her a substantial portion of her Indian gems as a marriage present, should Pete have married her. His mother wasn’t all that happy about Alicia’s looks when she appeared on the scene as a prospective bride, but she acknowledged her determination and excellent academic record.   – He screwed his eyes again, called the waitress over and ordered cognac. – And all of a sudden you turned up and changed things. You put a spanner in the works. – His eyes seemed to be expressing gratitude. – At any rate, Alicia wasn’t very successful.

I thought back to Pete in ‘Pushkin’, just as I was leaving the restaurant: he didn’t know about his mother then.  The major events of our life have nothing to do with how and when we would like them to occur; we are at their mercy, and we must accept them as they come to us.    The strongest personalities manage to adjust to new circumstances without giving up. Somehow I believed that Pete would overcome his troubles, that his eyes would remain radiant and honest, proof of his open-hearted, generous nature.  He gave everyone, including himself, all the chances he could.   It was easy and pleasant to be in his company, and he had an intrinsic ability to understand the others – never basing this understanding on crude logical constructions. I find people like Pete very easy to trust, and I don’t need any explanations why.

- The problem is, - Ilya continued quietly, - that you and Pete’s mother Gina are alike as two peas in a pod – It was that complicated coincidence that saved you in Tunis.  Otherwise they would have compromised you, but Gina prevented them from doing so.
- Thanks her a lot. – My irony was lost on him. 
- Simon is me. – He screwed up his eyes again, observing me shrewdly and waiting for my reaction. - Å-mail has been changed a little bit, as you probably have noticed. He has never written anything to you himself. I have been acquainted with him for a dozen years. He frequently comes to Moscow. That’s how he has paid his old debt.
- How many years have you been following me for? – I asked.
- The whole of my life. – There was hardly any cognac left in his wine glass.
- What do you and Alabyan want from Pete? Where is he?
- Alicia asked him to forgive her when she was in the burning tower.  She told him to find you, I think.   – He didn’t react to my mentioning Alabyan.
- Don’t make up stories, – I said, - Although it doesn’t really matter.
- I was close to her after Tunis in America. She loved Pete, in her own way.
- Of course you were close to her, as she was such a promising heiress. – I was trying my hardest not to make comments like that; after all, I needed to hear what he had to tell me.  Although it wasn’t as if my witticisms had even the slightest effect on Ilya. 

- Gina wanted to see you. Pete promised her she would meet you one day. She was a magnificently strong, harmonic personality. The father died of cancer soon after Pete’s return from Africa, after an interval of about three or four years. His mother’s collection of sapphires is unique, totally unrivalled.  It reflects the whole story of the art of jewelry from the eighteenth century through to the twentieth centuries.  The collection includes rare pieces by Van Cleef & Arpels, as well as some that belonged to the lost archives. I hope you appreciate the significance of these items? – Ilya asked, rather pathetically. – But where exactly is this collection? – he continued, –And what did Pete’s mother write in her will? What is Pete going to do with it? Plenty of buyers would be interested in it.
- Oh, how well I understand you! – I was burning with anger by this point.
- Pete married Alicia’s friend, a truly crazy woman. On the whole, Pete is pretty strange himself.  According to Gina, his private life is damned.  He’s a successful businessman – extremely successful – but his relationship with his children is complicate, and neither of his lovers have been a good match for him in terms of status, financial position and intellectual background. He has been eternally experimenting with his life.
- We don’t know enough to talk about such things! - I was beginning to hate my interlocutor. But Ilya had made it his goal to provide me with information, and it was clear that nothing was going to distract him.   
- Pete has a rare kind of tumor.  He can live with it as long as he takes the right medicine, just as you can live with diabetes.  The best cure for him is peace of mind.  Material boons mean nothing to him, so if, as we suspect, the collection has been left to him, he could do any number of thing with the jewelry.  We are in a position to buy the entire collection, and we will even be able to add certain valuable items to it.  But we’re not going to be able to convince Pete. 

- And there we come, - I said, before I could stop myself.
- He’s left for the funeral, but he’ll come back here, for your sake, even if you are seeing someone else.   
- No doubt you’ve already made enquires in that direction too.  – At least I have a chance to use your information, - I thought.
- Well, he’s not exactly straightforward either.  By the way, he sometimes comes to Moscow without arranging to meet with you.  That information’s free.  Think of it as a gift from me – he told me in a lordly tone of voice.  I accepted the news without protest.  – You can’t imagine how like Pete’s mother you are.  I saw her once.  If I were in his shoes I would leave you at once.  But Pete’s an idiot, – he concluded. 
- Pete has seen Simon’s letter – that is, he’s seen those notes you faked. He must be thinking that I’m beginning to understand, although that isn’t the case at all. Pete has never trusted you.
- There are certain types of relationship that have nothing to do with trust. – Ilya winked at me with his glassy eyes.
- You’re talking about an offer that no-one can refuse – I said, hoping he’d catch the irony in my voice.
-You’ll get your piece of pie, don’t worry- Ilya said, evidently trying to reassure me.
-You’re talking about money?! Are you saying what I think you’re saying? 
  - Millions of dollars are not easy to come by.
- Nor are honesty and dignity. – It wasn’t a boast; I was speaking with absolute sincerity.
-  Save your morals for your daughters; I’m sure they’re lucky to have a mother like you.  Or maybe you can preach on the radio, – It sounded as though Ilya was sidetracking now. 
Finally, I had forced him out of his robotic mode.   
- It’s far too late for me to alter my convictions. Play your game without me. You’ve got excellent assistants. – The very thought of Alabyan made me want to wash my hands and gargle my throat.  There was nothing between us – not a trace of friendship, intimacy, youthful memories… Ilya was an unfaithful son of a bitch, perfect traitor as far as I was concerned.
- You clearly don’t understand the finer points of the situation, Sophia. I look on Pete as a friend.
- Everybody has their own idea of friendship and love. I can’t judge your notion of friendship and you can’t judge mine. 
- I wish you could understand me, - Ilya repeated. – We’re worlds apart – you’re certainly right about that.  I’m not forcing you to commit a crime, so don’t make me out to be some sort of villain.  All you have to do is to talk to Pete.  The decision will be totally in his hands.  I’m just keen to make sure I make the most of this opportunity, and I think that in my own way, I’m right about all this.  You are free to do what you want to do, as you always have been. Come and visit me in Geneva.  I’ll introduce you to the wives – my wife and Sergey’s, that is – you can rest for a few days, we’ll take a trip up to the mountains….
- The mountains always give me a headache. 































11

Spring, with its dripping thaw, running streams, young leaves and new exhibitions came and went.  In May I flew to Hong Kong. I was definitely beginning to like Asia.  I have always found people from the Far East attractive. I was surprised to meet some tall, slender Chinese people, both men and women, who were fashionably dressed.  The hotel service was polite and considerate; the taxi-drivers, waiters, guides, and food were all excellent; all this as well as the marvelous urban landscape combined with the stunning expanse of ocean made my stay there very comfortable indeed. The new products by Van Cleef that the company had invited us to get acquainted with seemed even better against the background of this Asian harmony. Everybody liked everything. We barely stayed in the hotel for a single moment.  In the market the vases, the stone engraving, the masterful handicrafts, the colours, the shapes, the ornaments and all the other objects harking back to ancient civilization filled me with admiration and optimism for the human race.  I returned exultant.
Then came the summer. The Prince started his divorce proceedings and invited me to go on a “pre-marriage tour” to Andalusia. I forbade him from using a word like that, given its absolute absurdity even as a joke. I told him once and for all that I am never going to get married, although as a rule men don’t believe such things.

The restored gardens of Alhambra made me feel melancholy despite the heat. The enormous crowd of tourists was very annoying.  It was strange to think that I’d been dreaming of visiting those gardens since I was a schoolgirl.  But I managed to relax, and to quiz our guide.   He kept describing how beautiful it was there, pointing out the way that the architects had played with the contrast between sun and shade, as well as the contrast between coolness and warmth. But why haven’t they restored even one of the halls, making it at least approximately similar to its original interior?  Why is there not even a single carpet inside?  There were only the ceilings and the walls to look at, and yet they still call it a museum.  However, they have managed to build a spacious modern palace nearby, where visitors could use the bathrooms.  The Prince took me to Muhammad V’s Courtyard of the Lions to take photos. Twelve lions were supporting the di-hexagonal bowl of the fountain; the ceilings and walls of the galleries surrounding the courtyard were decorated with filigree arabesques; thick forest of columns lent the courtyard an air of solemnity, while the splashing of the fountain created a musical background.  There were women’s apartments above the galleries. Nobody knows what their relationship with Muhammad V was like. Each of the women must have prayed for him not to forget her name, for him to call her to his apartment at least once a month.  The unlucky ones could have their heads cut off for an attempt of adultery, or even for a single careless glance. 

We live in a cruel world, a world that is power-loving and unpredictable, but nevertheless... The most important thing is to overcome poverty and illiteracy.  We didn’t achieve that goal in the 20th century.  But not everything can be done at once.
The Prince had been transferring money to some Sudanese family for several years, for them to spend on their son. My Perestroika experience and my shredded faith in unselfish charity and mercy made it hard for me to believe that his arrangement was really what it seemed.  It was quite possible that my Prince was being cheated by some bogus fund run by dishonest officials who profited from the poor of corrupted countries.  Ordinary people always have to pay for the politicians. Americans have to make up for the actions of their greedy corporations; we in Russia have to deal with the legacy of communism. Now the Europeans want us to repent for that communism – and the people who are supposed to be repenting are the ones who have paid for communism with millions of people who suffered in the camps and who were lost during the war. I don’t know whether I feel as though I should repent.  And if I did, who should I repent to? Prince’s friends have always acted slightly funny about him having a relationship with a Russian woman. “Unlike them”, he would joke.  First, we were seen as KGB agents, then as ballet-dancers-prostitutes, then as sly seducers, buying expensive clothes and making their wives jealous. There seemed to be no other Russian women, like on TV: you can only watch what’s suitable from the government’s point of view. But in reality there are very few truly bad mothers and scheming women.  Good and Evil are everywhere, not just in Russia.  And at base, everybody likes good food, clean linen, and for their children to be happy while they are growing up.

I was sitting with a friend in a caf; not far from my house. I didn’t want to eat or to go home, so I decided to ask for something small: I chose a portion of valerian salad, which was called “Flutter”, and she chose something else. At home, my suitcase was waiting to be packed.   
I was about to go on a short business trip to Paris – the usual meeting of the directorate of the company’s European boutiques.  It’s a meeting I always attend with pleasure; I love my job. 
- Two cowboys with weather-worn faces fall in love, but the aggressive society they live in does not recognize their feelings: thus one of them becomes an unhappy, homeless old man, and the other one is cut off in prime. – Maria was discussing with her mother the film we had just seen.  – Regards to you, - she told me, passing on a message from her mother.  - Well, do go and see it. Bye. They should go out to see the film, - she said to me. She was speaking about her mother and her husband Oleg.

Oleg was one of those guys who liked extreme sports.  Although he’d obviously never tried bungee jumping from a bridge, he had only given up parachuting two or three years ago. He was about seven years younger than Maria’s mother, but he didn’t know that. She had faked the age in her passport to make herself look ten years younger even before she had met him, so that she wouldn’t have to retire.  She had undergone acupuncture and leech therapy; she had taken liqueurs made from Tibetan herbs; she didn’t eat meat, swam regularly, cut her hair short and wore high-heeled shoes.   “I just can’t work it out.  At what age did you give birth to Maria?” Oleg once asked, thoughtfully.  She had to confess her age then, although she added just five years instead of ten. 

- That film is just made for them both, - Maria remarked. – The mountain scenery that they’re so fond of is captured brilliantly. – She was talking about the excellent shots together with the stunning alpine setting, alpinism being one of Oleg’s favourite hobbies. 
- If the second one hadn’t been gay, his car wouldn’t have exploded like that, - I said, referring to one of the actors in the film, chewing my salad.
- Well, yes. They just had to get rid of him. They couldn’t let them be together.  But then they would have suffered living apart, and they were sick and tired of suffering. – Maria was not very sentimental. If she disliked a situation, she tried to forget about it without sorting the matter out in her head.   Things like that happen in real life also – every tragedy has its causes.
- So what do you say to the deaths of the little children?
- Enough of that! – Maria was really categorical.
I decided not to delve any further into the matter.  I just sat there thinking about Alicia.
- Whether or not homosexual relations are sinful…. - Maria continued, expressing her doubts aloud. - Similar things also happen between animals.  And anyway, aren’t polygamous relationships sinful? I’m not just thinking of prostitutes; what about ordinary girls looking for rich men, or vice versa? You yourself have told me that young men sometimes try to court you.
- Sin entails punishment and punishment entails purification. The main thing is that somebody is able steal a million dollars, while someone else is deprived of the right to love his neighbor.
  - It’s the same with horoscopes, - Maria was pondering. – Leos can’t coexist with Scorpios – it’s hell for them to be together. There are other similarly opposing couples.  It’s like a nightmare, either paralyzing your will, or resulting in a complete fusion. Take, for example, a slave and his owner. To love the owner means to torture, and to love the slave means boredom. Everything is clear to the astrologers. They write volumes discussing what is good and what is bad about such couples. Women read these stories and begin to find faults with their beloved husbands.
- Enough of that, Maria. That sort of stuff doesn’t interest me.  You can’t make these crazy calculations that attempt to take every detail into account.  Your cyberneticist was quite simply an ideal match for you. 
- His name was wrong.
- Well, some folks are wise and some are otherwise, - I couldn’t help saying.
In fact I liked Maria, and I had always forgiven her bitchiness, her envious looks, and her occasional irresistible desire to play boss in our relationship, especially when we were in public. And admittedly, it’s hard to relax in my company.
- You told me yourself that he would lose the game, - she said, by way of reply.
- Me? I never intervene. I have to go pack, remember? Otherwise I’ll end up throwing in all sorts of stuff I don’t need. Let’s go!
Maria had black curly shoulder-length hair and white skin. Red nail varnish suited her well.
* * *
Charles de Gaulle Airport was very familiar to me – I knew every corridor, every snack bar, at least in the direction of our terminal.   I was standing at the luggage belt, waiting for my half-empty suitcase.   My younger daughter called me from her office.
- Mum, I’ve just received a very queer e-mail.
- Read it to me, - I said at once.
- “Dear Lisa, tell Sophie that:
1. A collection of photos titled “Mr. Kent in Moscow” is ready to be sent to the address 5, Saint Martine Street (this was the Prince’s address).
2. The Director of a European jewelry company in charge of European regions and the countries of the former USSR could receive a letter that might be of interest to him, disclosing some peculiar circumstances of customer service by the director of one of the major shops in his region. (Anonymous letters are always invaluable in terms of their informative value.)
3. There is a little caf; on the street opposite the hotel in which she is currently staying, set a little askew from the road. I would like to meet her there today at 21.00 hrs local time.
Best of luck.
Yours, A”

- “Best of luck” – Who? –I was shaking all over.
 - “A”, - replied Lisa. - Mum, are you OK?
- Sure, dear. Is there any return address? – I asked a stupid question, for some reason.
- No, there isn’t. It was sent from the post office.
- Don’t worry. I know who has done it. I have to go – lots of love.
That son of a bitch was interfering in my life yet again. I couldn’t even identify my feelings towards him: whether I should describe them as hatred or disgust.  But who cares what my feelings were called?  Everything else about the matter was perfectly clear. 
I took my suitcase and got into a taxi driven by a neat Vietnamese man.  I told him the address and sat back; I had some forty minutes before my arrival to think everything over.  Once I got there, however, I scarcely had enough time to change my clothes and make my way to the office.
I went into the office and greeted everybody. The place felt strange; I didn’t understand what was happening. 
- What’s up, Isabelle? – I asked the secretary, who was standing nearby with a newspaper.
- Sophie, don’t you have any idea what’s going on?
- No. What am I supposed to know? – I was feeling sick.
- The aircraft from Geneva has crashed. Patrick and Helen from the Genevan boutique were on it. They were flying to the meeting. – Isabelle was in shock. I noticed livid spots on her neck.
- Has everybody been killed?
  - In all probability, yes. There was no chance of survival.

I didn’t know what was driving me; I don’t even remember whether I was properly conscious.  I didn’t know what I was saying, or what I must have looked like.  I left the office and went into the street, pulled out my mobile and dialed the number.  A long time passed before the receiver was picked up.
- Hello, Sophie, - Sergey said.
- Look here, you son of a bitch, and all your bloody partners. You don’t really know me. I am no longer a silly little haunted girl from a non-existent country.
- Don’t shout at me! Do you know what’s happened to the plane?
- And what of it? – I was wet all over, shuddering, feeling sick – it felt as though a devilish spirit was active inside me, trying to win some internecine battle. – What do you mean? – I asked the same question again, my voice hoarse.   
- Ilya and Alabyan were on the same plane. We’re going to see his wife now.  It’s a real tragedy….
I disconnected.
The spirit died.
Exhausted, driven mad, my face probably flaming red, I leant against the wall of the house I was standing outside.  The Place Vendome was on my left. I remembered Maria’s curly hair and our talk before my departure. I looked up to see the sky. It was a bright blue Parisian sky.




























12

My favorite month, September, came round slowly and without fuss. The antiquarian saloon in Bolshoi Manege was already past history. We had exhibited our collections on the jewelry floor, and then we had moved to the new boutique in Stoleshnikov Alley. I was extremely busy as the weeks passed by.  My private life consisted of Prince, who was absolutely fine for me. Two business trips to France were planned for before the New Year, one of which was to Versailles, with the purpose of attending the Christmas celebrations there.

Once, Prince brought his Italian friend to Moscow. He was a descendent of the famous Leopardi family – the offspring of duke Jacomo Leopardi, who had been a lyrical poet of the beginning of the nineteenth century. I rarely read foreign poetry, something I always regret.  I regret it, but I still never seem to find time to read it. The Italian’s name was Guido. I thought that he was lively and shrewd, with slightly vague ideas – he was the sort of person who only really skimmed the surface, gleaning what he could from listening to others, participating in conversation and asking questions. I think he was in the agriculture business, dealing with new biotechnologies, but the most important thing was that he had to maintain and repair the castle near Ancona that he had inherited. I had been there; it is a really beautiful place. The surrounding countryside can be viewed from the upper glass saloon, where tea is served; you can see meadows, hills, villages, roads, and a stone-paved entrance terrace for the carriages leading immediately to the second floor. It is very damp inside. Prince and I slept in different rooms, so obviously different beds as well. There had been fur coats and mantles, which had belonged to Guido’s deceased mother, sewn by the celebrated Fendi sisters. Nobody had worn them for a long time, but they must have been afraid to throw them out. I remember waiting for a ghost to appear. The Prince woke me up one night and told me that he had quite distinctly heard the window squeaking, as though it had been blown by the wind, although Prince had made sure it was firmly shut.   I was wide-awake at once.  But what he’d really woken me for was something quite different, the sly seducer.  There was a cot in each room, hung about with dark portraits of some dead inhabitants of the castle, with sad and serious faces. Everything in that castle inspired melancholy. It seemed to me that it was no longer alive, that we were just pestering its old body. Guido had repaired the wash rooms, installed new faucets, spacious bath-tubs, and showers; he had restored the furniture and created a small museum downstairs.  Soldiers from Napoleon’s army had stayed there once, leaving behind a heap of rifles, pikes and even a cannon. We always had dinner in nearby restaurants.  I find that when there’s nothing to eat at home, any normal way of life is out of the question. Some time ago Guido had had a wife.  The pair of them had two sons, who didn’t live with him.  That’s the way with material possessions: you can own a real castle and still not be truly happy.    

On that day everything went very well for my guests. The three of us were sitting in the restaurant of the State Department Store , looking out at Red Square; it was drizzling, the pianist was playing, and I was eating up my panna cotta with raspberry.
- Sophie, I haven’t seen any ballet dancers yet, and my flight is scheduled for tomorrow, - Guido said, hinting that there had been some flaw in our cultural schedule.
I picked up the receiver and called an usherette, who was one of my friends, just in case – “Tosca” was being performed in the Bolshoi that day, I thought it was worth making inquiries.  All of a sudden she told me about Eifman’s performance, saying that she could procure three tickets for us, although one of the three would be at the other end of the hall.  I looked at my watch feeling exultant, as I always do before a ballet performance.
  -You will get your chance to see ballet-dancers, Guido! Let’s go!

It was difficult to park in front of the Operetta Theatre. We were hardly able to find space. The hall was full of people. It was raining. People were asking for extra tickets in front of the theatre.
At last, everyone found their seats.
And then the waterfall began..
Music, my heartbeat, tears standing in my eyes, Eifman’s fancy, magnificent, graceful polyphony. Bach’s music was being played. The performance was staged in honor of Balanchine. Once again, everything was upside down – it was Pete’s image in my mind.  He called me every once in a while. I looked at Prince, wondering if he could discern my melancholy, but under the circumstances nobody could have done that.
Why did I pin my hopes on Prince ?

It seemed to me that he had always understood everything; he had given me a certain sort of freedom and had forgiven me my weaknesses, taking care of my dignity, preventing me from overloading myself with household duties, appreciating my beauty, and treating his relationship with me as something to boast of. He was the kind of person who knew exactly what he was going to be doing this year and next year; he knew how much time he was going to spend on business activities, on sport, on me and on his friends. He also knew for sure where he was going, and what for. You couldn’t make him do anything that hadn’t been scheduled, but something that was part of his plan was bound to happen.  He knew what he was going to eat today, and on Sunday; he knew when my birthday was and he remembered what present he had given me last time. He couldn’t bear clothes shops, which was even funny at times – I bought everything in Moscow for him, even the underwear. He had left his wife because he had planned and analyzed everything. But he was in no hurry to move to my place. He had not yet worked out how he could do that without compromising his business – the sticking point for him was that it was difficult to arrange everything as it should be while living in Moscow, and I certainly hadn’t pressed him to do so.  He was a handsome man, who would be torn into pieces by eager women given the slightest chance. That was why I called him Prince. 
The dancer’s physical appearance resembled Balanchine.  At least he was keen to achieve a likeness.

I had met Pete in Rome, in the summer. It wasn’t an accident; we had agreed the time and place of the meeting beforehand.
He has always been in my heart. I have preserved his memory all my life, whispering ‘Pete’ both when happy and when distressed.  The word has been like a prayer for me.  My soul has been looking for another, kindred soul.  How should I know why that is? I have met so many people: some of them have been mysterious, clever, strong, artful and, last but not least, beautiful.  The flute was playing, and the happy morning sun was rising to welcome the new day. But all of them have left me. Or I have escaped from them myself...?  And now I have found him, alive and all grown-up, just when he has gone astray in life... Can you really believe that dreams come true? That this poor material world cannot be forced to submit to human feelings?   Do you think you deserve something? Then go ahead!

 I had a customer, Ostap Viktorovich, in Rome.  He was an elderly man, and he invited me to his place quite often.  His wife, Valentina Ivanovna, invited me there even more persistently and eagerly. She had been his doctor at Moscow hospital when he underwent treatment while suffering from pneumonia. Then he got well, became rich and went to Italy. He used to say that he was like Maxim Gorky . Valentina Ivanovna thought that he was the very image of Ostap Bender . He finally managed to buy a cottage on Capri, but he was really very fond of Rome. He was a rare personality. He had been a pilot in his youth.  The two of them used to come to Moscow to see children born from their first marriages. It’s certainly strange and suspicious when people become millionaires in the space of just several years, but there had been no laws in the crazy nineties, and there had been a lot of natural resources that were easy for the determined to lay their hands on. Somehow, he had hit lucky. When he started to make money, everything was much easier. In Italy he was busy with private banking and fishing. Valentina Ivanovna went shopping and enjoyed in long conversations in caf;s with her Russian friends. She acquired a fair knowledge of Italian and a taste for Van Cleef and Arpels – our products, by the way, were not to be found in Italy except for in a small seasonal shop in Sardinia.  I’ve been to Sardinia with Prince; we stayed at his Italian friend’s place. It’s a clubbing district, densely populated by long-legged girls. I remember that the peach-coloured villas were particularly wonderful, as well as some special flowery sea smell.

Of course, it was very hot in Rome in the summer. Ostap and Valentina were living in an ancient house with spacious veranda, smothered in flowers and small cypresses. It was obvious that the servants had been severely reprimanded in case of improper maintenance of suspended garden. The hostess offered Pete and me soft wicker armchairs and suggested that we enjoy an exquisite light supper in her company. She was savoring the opportunity to speak in Russian – it was obvious that she had missed that kind of communication. That’s the main reason why people feel like coming back to their homeland from abroad. Pictures - you can see them on the TV.
- Sophie, I have been reading a book about Van Cleef & Arpels, and I’ve come across the description of a marvelous cat that was produced in 1954. Can you order it for me? Produce it for me and make it out as an individual order. I will come to Moscow and fetch it by New Year.
The cat was really magnificent: it had one eye screwed shut, and the other, which was a shining emerald, wide open.  It was a winking cat, kind of a grotesque. It wasn’t a typical item for the stylish Van Cleef & Arpels.
- We will produce it for you, Valentina, but it would be better to add some more stones to it in order to make its price about twenty thousand.

  -Well, add stones, for God’s sake! I’ve got no problem with that. – She was savoring the role of millionaire’s wife, although dressed without much show.  At the same time, her clothes were expensive, of course: she was wearing a spacious silk trouser suit and slip-on shoes by Chanel. There were sapphire earrings in her ears and a string of gray pearls with a diamond locket around her neck. She was about 55-57 years old, no more, and he was about 65 years old. Her eyes were amber-colored, a yellowish brown, and she had an ample breast, thin wrists, and a tender voice. She was a cozy, homely lady from Zhukovsky, in the Moscow region. The paradox was that God had endowed her with artistic taste, if you could call it that. She had a real sense of beauty. Rome must have been her favourite place, rather than her husband’s.

I was observing this couple, already through with the majority of their lives, and I realized that I could see real love.  She used to call him her Moscow thug, the bombardier of her soul, the exterminator of her friends, and he accepted all these compliments smilingly. They must have been really happy for the first time in their lives.  That was how it seemed, at least. You could tell from the way their house was furnished, by the way their supper was served, and by the look in their eyes. Ostap overwhelmed Pete with his detailed knowledge of America, especially New York and San Francisco. They didn’t talk politics at all.

 - We made up just recently, - Valentina whispered to me, - just before your arrival.
I looked at her in astonishment.
- We haven’t been speaking to each other for two weeks. I just find it impossible to be here without doing anything.  Let’s set up a jewelry school in Moscow.  I’ll organize training in Italy for our students:  I mean for our artists, technicians and so on. We’ll get a couple of banks involved in the matter, and create a whole new brand. We’ll design our own beads in collaboration with you. We have diamonds, platinum and gold in our country as well, after all.  And surely we have some bright young minds to hire, too? Must we really spend all our money paying foreigners? – Then she said, upon reflection: - But order the cat for me all the same.
- I will think over your offer, Valentina, - I said, and glanced at the men, absorbed in their conversation. Pete was saying something about Moscow .
- You should never be afraid, - the hostess went on – You shouldn’t be afraid of dreaming. You’ll succeed with everything that you have clear in your head. It’s only with love affairs that nothing can be calculated from the very beginning: they are the greatest mystery and an eternal training for mind.  Logic shouldn’t interfere when it comes to love.  It’s no cup of tea… - Valentina Ivanovna seemed to be trying to sound original.
- Look here, dear, Pete also thinks your idea about the Russian Jewelry House could be workable, - Ostap said unexpectedly.
- It could be the new Faberge! I believe in it!
We left them greatly inspired.
We were going along the burning hot streets of Rome. Pete took my hand into his, his fingers fumbled my onyx flower ring on my right little finger – my first and favorite thing by Van Cleef, and I thought: “Here it is - the Midsummer’s night!”

- You know, - I told Prince, - I’ve decided to change my life.
- It’s a pity I haven’t managed to find out what it is you really love, - said the clever Prince.
- I love both this and that, both yesterday and tomorrow, the things we have experienced and the things that have never happened to us... - There was a ticket to Rome in my handbag. – And I also love the ballet – very much indeed.

Moscow, 2005-2006